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THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 



.m>^ 




LEAVING THE MORGUE. 



Frontispiece. 



J THE 

UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER 

By CHARLES DICKENS 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARCUS STONE, R.A. 



A REPRINT OF THE EDITION CORRECTED BY THE 

AUTHOR IN 1867-68, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY 

CHARLES DICKENS THE YOUNGER 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 

By CHARLES DICKENS 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARCUS STONE, R.A. 

\ APR ^^1898 






MACMILLAN AND CO. 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1896 

All rights reserved 






COPTKIGHT, 1896, 

By MACMILLAN AND CO. 



J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick &. Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER 



THE 



UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER 



BY 

CHARLES DICKENS 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY 

CHARLES DICKENS THE YOUNGER 



MACMILLAN AND CO. 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1896 

All rights reserved 



CONTENTS. 

THE UNCOMMEECIAL TEAVELLEE. 
I 

PAGE 

His General Line of Business 1 

II 

The Shipwreck 2 

III 

Wapping Workhouse 14 

IV 
Two Views of a Cheap Theatre 23 

V 

Poor Mercantile Jack 34 

VI 

Refreshments for Travellers 44 

VII 

Travelling Abroad 52 

VIII 

The Great Tasmania's Cargo ....... 62 



xii CONTENTS. 

IX 

PAGE 

City of London Churches 70 

X 

Shy Neighbourhoods 80 

XI 
Tramps 89 

XII 

Dullborough Town 100 

XIII 
Night Walks .... 109 

XIV 
Chambers 117 

XV 

Nurse's Stories 129 

XVI 

Arcadian London 138 

XVII 

The Italian Prisoner 147 

XVIII 
The Calais Night-Mail 155 

XIX 

Some Recollections of Mortality . . . • J^ «• • • ^^^ 



CONTENTS. xill 

XX 

PAGE 

Birth-day Celebrations 172 

XXI 

The Short-Timers 180 

XXII 

Bound for the Great Salt Lake 190 

XXIII 

The City of the Absent 201 

XXIV 

An Old Stage-Coaching House 208 

XXV 

The Boiled Beef of New England 216 

XXVI 
Chatham Dockyard 224 

XXVII 
In the French-Flemish Country 232 

XXVIII 
Medicine Men of Civilisation 241 

XXIX 

Titbull's Alms-houses 249 

XXX 
The Ruffian 260 



xiv CONTENTS. 

XXXI 

PAGE 

Aboard Ship 266 

XXXII 

A Small Star in the East 275 

XXXIII 

A Little Dinner in an Hour 285 

XXXIV 
Mr. Barlow 291 

XXXV 

On an Amateur Beat 296 

XXXVI 

A Fly-Leaf in a Life 304 

XXXVII 

A Plea for Total Abstinence 308 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

PAGE 
LEAVING THE MORGUE FrOlltlSpieCe 

A CHEAP THEATRE — SATURDAY NIGHT 27 

A CITY PERSONAGE ......... 77 

" THIS IS A SWEET SPOT, AIN't IT ? A LOVELLY SPOT ! " . . 91 

LAUNDRESSES 119 

TIME AND HIS WIFE 203 

A PHENOMENON AT TITBULL'S 257 

POODLES GOING THE ROUND 301 



INTRODUCTION. 

This edition of " The Uncommercial Traveller '^ has been 
printed from that which was carefully corrected by the 
author in 1867 and 1868, and contains the whole of the 
papers originally published under that title, including "A 
Fly-Leaf in a Life," which was not included in the English 
reprint. 

Three series of " The Uncommercial Traveller " were pub- 
lished in "All the Year Eound." The first began in the 
second volume, and finished with "The Italian Prisoner" 
in the fourth. The first of the second series was " The 
Calais Night-Mail" in the ninth volume, and the last, "The 
Euffian," in the twentieth. The first of the third series, 
"Aboard Ship," appeared in the first volume of the new 
series of " All the Year Eound ; " and the last, " A Plea 
for Total Abstinence," in the second. The papers in the 
first and second series were, as originally published in the 
magazine, simply headed "The Uncommercial Traveller," 
and had no sub-titles. The papers in the third series were 
headed "Kew Uncommercial Samples," and each had its 
title as well. 

There is nothing to be said as to the history of the com- 
position of these papers, except that they were written at 
all sorts of times, places, and seasons, and in the intervals 
of a great deal of hard work of other kinds. Such explan- 
atory and other remarks as I have thought it desirable to 
make are printed as notes at the beginning of the papers 
to which they refer. 

CHAELES DICKENS 

THE YOUNGER. 

London, 1895. 



NOTES. 



REFRESHMENTS FOR TRAVELLERS. 

[The arrangements of the Railway Station Refreshment Room 
were to be still more severely attacked in the " Boy at Mugby," 
one of the stories in " Mugby Junction," the Christmas number 
of " All the Year Round " for 1866, and this was one of the cases 
in which Charles Dickens's writings undoubtedly had a consider- 
able share in bringing about a much-needed reform. Very soon 
after the publication of " Mugby Junction," Mr. Felix Spiers and 
Mr. Christopher Pond came over from Australia, and, greatly 
assisted by this vigorous awakening of public opinion on the 
subject, set successfully to work to bring about a complete change. 
Perhaps there are still a good many openings for improvement 
here and there, but it is difficult nowadays to realise the absolute 
squalor and wretchedness of everything under the old system. 

When Pip took Estella to have that cup of tea before she went 
down to Richmond, he had an experience not at all unlike that 
of Mr. Grazinglands. To-day the streets of London absolutely 
swarm with comfortable, cheap, and good restaurants and places 
for the supply of light refreshments ; and ladies without male 
escort, who in the old days had no resource but the tender mercies 
of the confectioner's shop, are perfectly independent in the matter 
of meals of all kinds. 

As to hotels, they have been revolutionised altogether ; and 
people, travelling much more than they did five and thirty years 
ago, and being on the whole infinitely better treated, are content 
to do without the satisfaction of that " personal retail interest," 
which, although gratifying to one's sense of self-importance, had 
to be paid for like everything else.] 

THE ITALIAN PRISONER. 

[This was the last paper of the first series of the " Uncommer- 
cial Traveller," as originally published in " All the Year Round." 
The " generous Englishman," of whom this true story is told, was 
Lord Dudley Stuart.] 

TRAVELLING ABROAD. 

[The story of Charles Dickens's childhood with which this paper 
begins has been more extensively quoted, it may fairly be assumed, 
than anything he ever wrote. In a letter to M. de Cerjat, dated 



NOTES. xix 

Jan. 17th, 1857, he describes himself as saying to Mr. W. H. Wills 
one day when they were passing the house, " It has always a curious 
interest for me, because when I was a small boy down in these 
parts I thought it the most beautiful house (I suppose because of 
its famous old cedar trees) ever seen. And my poor father used 
to bring me to look at it, and used to say that if I ever grew up to 
be a clever man, perhaps I might own that house, or such another 
house. In remembrance of which I have always, in passing, 
looked to see if it was to be sold or let ; and it has never been to 
me like any other house, and it has never changed at all." Oddly 
enough, the long-looked-for opportunity came on the very next day, 
and the house became the property of the " very queer small boy " 
at last. 

The travelling chariot here mentioned is, of course, founded on 
that famous vehicle which is described at the opening of "Pictures 
from Italy," and its never-to-be-forgotten journey from Paris to 
Genoa is the groundwork of the present paper. Writing about 
this carriage to John Forster before the Italian Expedition, Charles 
Dickens said that he thought of looking for " some good old shabby 
devil of a coach — one of those vast phantoms that hide themselves 
in a corner of the Pantechnicon " ; — and when he found what he 
w^anted, he wrote again, describing his acquisition thus : " As for 
comfort — let me see — it is about the size of your library ; with 
night lamps and day lamps and pockets and imperials and leathern 
cellars, and the most extraordinary contrivances. Joking apart, 
it is a wonderful machine. And when you see it (if you do see 
it), you will roar at it first, and will then proclaim it to be 'per- 
fectly brilliant, my dear fellow.' " "It was marked sixty pounds," 
Forster adds, " and he got it for five-and-forty ; and my own emo- 
tions respecting it he had described by anticipation quite correctly." 

" Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into 
the Morgue," Charles Dickens says here. Another terribly graphic 
account of " the obscene little Morgue," as it is there called, will 
be found in " Some Recollections of Mortality," an uncommercial 
paper published about three years later than " Travelling Abroad." 
Describing elsewhere the visit to the Morgue, in which he made 
the acquaintance of the " large dark man," who haunted him so 
unpleasantly afterwards, Charles Dickens wrote of the custodian 
of the horrible place as "smoking a short pipe at his little window, 
and giving a bit of fresh turf to a linnet in a cage."] 

POOR MERCANTILE JACK. 

[The establishment of many excellent Sailors' Homes has done 
a great deal for Jack of late years, but has not succeeded in chang- 
ing his nature. Consequently, when he comes ashore, he too often 
"wants his freedom" — for, even if you do not overdo the Sailors' 
Home with strictness, you must have rules and regulations, and 
take care that they are observed — and throws his money away in 
the society of Antonio and his friends just as he did in I860.] 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 



THE GREAT TASMANIA'S CARGO. 

[The case of the " Great Tasmania " was an unusually bad one, 
no doubt ; and better care is taken of the assemblage of lads which 
does duty nowadays for a British army than was enjoyed by their 
predecessors, the soldiers of thirty or forty years ago. But the 
Circumlocution Office is probably still capable, under tolerably 
favourable circumstances, of beating even this shameful record.] 

CITY CHURCHES. 

[I HAVE myself vivid recollections of some of the churches 
described in this paper, having on more than one occasion accom- 
panied my father, when I was a boy, on Sunday expeditions 
from Devonshire Terrace into the City. The congregations of the 
churches in the City of London are still, as a rule, very small — 
indeed, in many ways, the descriptions in this paper will represent 
the existing state of things with absolute fidelity — but a few 
energetic clergymen here and there have succeeded in awakening 
the limited congregations available to a greater show of spiritual 
activity than they used to display. Several City churches have 
been pulled down to make room for modern improvements, and 
their revenues have been utilised for the benefit of some of the 
new outlying districts where churches are more wanted than they 
are in the City. But a good deal more might be done with advan- 
tage in this direction.] 

ABOARD SHIP. 

[This was the first of the thkd series of the " Uncommercial 
Traveller," as originally published in " All the Year Round," the 
general title being now changed to " IS'ew Uncommercial Samples."] 

ON AN AMATEUR BEAT. 

[And see " A Small Star in the East," " Wapping Workhouse," 
and " Night Walks " in the present volume.] 

A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE. 

[The intolerable insolence, the obviously false arguments, and 
the gratuitous assumptions of the intemperate advocates of what 
is quite erroneously and absurdly called temperance were always 
hateful to Charles Dickens, and he devoted much good work to 
their exposure. See in the " Uncommercial Traveller," " The 
Boiled Beef of New England"; and in "Reprinted Pieces," " Frauds 
on the Fairies."] 



NOTES. 



THE KUFFIAN. 

[This was the last paper of the second series of the " Uncom- 
mercial Traveller," as originally published in "All the Year 
Round." Unfortunately it still represents facts far too closely, 
not only in London but in all our great cities as well, and will 
continue to do so as long as the sentimental opponents of the lash 
as a punishment for brutal personal violence are allowed to over- 
rule the teachings of common sense and experience. How the 
plague of abominable language, with which our streets are cursed, 
is to be stayed is, perhaps, a more difficult matter.] 

A FLY-LEAF IN A LIFE. 

[This little paper was not included in the original reprint of 
the " Uncommercial Traveller," but I give it here on account of its 
pathetic interest in connection with its author's premature death. 
It is always the saddest of all reflections to me that, if he could 
have been induced to take the warning of the temporary break- 
down to which it alludes, the end might have been long postponed. 
But it was in a sadly true prophetic vein that he wrote of himself 
some years before, " I have always felt of myself that I must, please 
God, die in harness. . . . How strange it is to be never at rest, 
and never satisfied, and ever trying after something that is never 
reached, and to be always laden with plot and plan and care and 
worry ; how clear it is that it must be, and that one is driven by 
an irresistible might until the journey is worked out ! It is much 
better to go on and fret than to stop and fret. As to repose — for 
some men there's no such thing in this life." 



THE CALAIS NIGHT-MAIL. 

[This was the first paper of the second series of the " Uncom- 
mercial Traveller," as originally published in " All the Year 
Round " ; and see in the " Uncommercial Traveller," " Our French 
Watering Place " ; and in the " Reprinted Pieces," " A Flight."] 

MEDICINE MEN OF CIVILISATION. 

[The "Englishman of an amiable nature, great enthusiasm, 
and no discretion," was a Mr. Angus Fletcher, a friend of Charles 
Dickens for many years, and a person of remarkable eccentricity 
— to say the least of it. After Fletcher's death, in 1862, Charles 
Dickens wrote, " Poor Fletcher is dead. Just as I am closing my 
letter I hear the sad story. He had been taken suddenly ill near 
the railway station at Leeds, and being accidentally recognised by 
one of the railway men was carried to the Infirmary, where the; 



xxii THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

doctor obtained his sister Lady Richardson's address, and wrote to 
her. She arrived to find him in a dangerous state, and after lin- 
gering four days he died. Poor Kindheart ! I think of all that 
made him so pleasant to us, and am full of grief." 

The preposterous follies, the wasteful extravagance, the shams, 
and the ghastly mockery of the regulation English funeral of 
Charles Dickens's time excited him to very genuine outbursts of 
indignation, and are frequently and very severely dealt with in 
his writings. One of his strongest assaults on the funeral fetish 
M^as contained in one of the papers embodying some of the opin- 
ions and criticisms of " The Raven in the Happy Family " in the 
first volume of " Household Words." This is too long to be given 
here, but will be found among the " Reprinted Pieces." The pro- 
ceedings of Mr. Mould in " Martin Chuzzlewit " and the funeral of 
Mrs. Gargery in " Great Expectations " are other cases in point. 
To his sister, Mrs. Austin, Charles Dickens wrote, in 1868, in 
reference to a funeral to which he had been invited, ^' I have the 
greatest objection to attend a funeral in which my affections are 
not strongly and immediately concerned. I have no notion of a 
funeral as a matter of form or ceremony. And just as I should 
expressly prohibit the summoning to my own burial of anybody 
who was not very near or dear to me, so I revolt from myself 
appearing at that solemn rite unless the deceased were very near 
and dear to me. I cannot endure being dressed up by an under- 
taker as part of his trade show." Finally his will contained the 
following express instruction : " I emphatically direct that I be 
buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private man- 
ner ; that no public announcement be made of the time or place 
of my burial ; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourn- 
ing coaches be employed ; and that those who attend my funeral 
wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such 
revolting absurdity." Certainly the English funeral was one of 
the things towards*^ the reform of which Charles Dickens did good 
service. 

The reference to the wigs and gowns of the lawyers in this 
paper is not quite to the same effect as an opinion on the subject, 
expressed in the "American Notes," which runs as follows: "I 
am by no means a wholesale admirer of our legal solemnities, 
many of which impress me as being extremely ludicrous. Strange 
as it may seem, too, there is undoubtedly a degree of protection 
in the wi^- and gown — a dismissal of individual responsibility m 
dressing for the part — which encourages that insolent bearing and 
language and that gross perversion of the office of a pleader for 
the Truth, so frequent in our courts of law. Still, I cannot help 
doubting whether America, in her desire to shake off the absurdi- 
ties and abuses of the old system, may not have gone too far into 
the opposite extreme ; and whether it is not desirable, especially 
in the small community of a city like this, where each man knows 
the other, to surround the administration of justice with some 
artificial barriers against the ' Hail fellow, well met ' deportment 



NOTES. xxiii 

of every-day life. All the aid it can have in the very high char- 
acter and ability of the Bench, not only here but elsewhere, it has, 
and well deserves to have ; but it may need something more, not 
to impress the thoughtful and well-informed, but the ignorant 
and heedless — a class which includes some prisoners and many 
witnesses."] 

NURSE'S STORIES. 

[There can be no doubt that these are real childish reminis- 
cences. The uncomfortable person who was so familiar with the 
stories of Captain Murderer and Chips figures also iii the " Holly 
Tree Inn," the Christmas number of " Household Words " for 
1855, in which she is described as "a sallow woman with a fishy 
eye, an aquiline nose, and a green gown, whose specialty was a dis- 
mal narrative of a landlord by the roadside, whose visitors unac- 
countably disappeared for many years, until it was discovered that 
the pursuit of his life had been to convert them into pies."] 

DULLBOROUGH TOWN. 

[DuLLBOROUGH TowN is Rochester in Kent, with a dash of its 
neighbour Chatham. It was in Clover Lane at Chatham that 
Charles Dickens went to school, the master's name being Giles. 
The worthy people who are always looking out for Dickens neigh- 
bourhoods and places, and who insist upon identifying them 
with the strictest accuracy, will see how very difficult a task they 
set themselves when they realise the fact that the South Eastern 
Railway (S. E. R.) had nothing to do with Chatham when this 
paper was written, but had its station at Strood, on the other side 
of the roadway opposite Rochester, and that Mr. Giles's playing- 
field could therefore by no manner of means have become "the 
property of S. E. R.," although it might very well have become "a 
wilderness of rusty iron " and the property of the London Chatham 
and Dover Railway, which was opened in 1861.] 

A SMALL STAR IN THE EAST. 

[Unhappily the condition of the "unemployed" in the East 
End of London has not materially improved since this paper was 
written, notwithstanding all the promises of all the politicians 
who have neglected the subject during the last seven-and-twenty 
years and all the senseless and unmeaning strikes which Trades' 
Union officials have promoted, mainly for their own benefit ; and 
in hard times — and the times are rarely anything else about Rat- 
cliff and Stepney — plenty of such scenes as are here described can 
be seen any day. 

The " Victorine " alluded to was a melodrama, which was famous 
at the Adelphi Theatre in the time of Mr. and Mrs. Yates, the 



xxiv THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

latter of whom played the title role ; and Mrs. Fitzwilliam was a 
favourite actress in the company. 

The East London Children's Hospital has grown into a flourish- 
ing institution ; but, unhappily, Mr. Heckford, its founder, who is 
so sympathetically described by Charles Dickens, died while he 
was still a young man. His widow went to South Africa, and 
afterwards published, in a book called "A Lady Trader in the 
Transvaal," a most curious and interesting account of her experi- 
ences among the Boers. 

And see the " Uncommercial" paper "On an Amateur Beat."] 

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF MORTALITY. 

[Other experiences of the Morgue will be found in the "Un- 
commercial" paper "Travelling Abroad." 

Of another " poor, spare, white-haired " tenant of the Morgue, 
Charles Dickens wrote to John Forster, "It seemed the strangest 
thing in the world that it should have been necessary to take any 
trouble to stop such a feeble, spent, exhausted morsel of life. It 
was just dusk when I went in ; the place was empty ; and he lay 
there, all alone, like an impersonation of the wintry eighteen 
hundred and forty-six."] 

TRAMPS. 

[In the course of his many long walks about the County of 
Kent, and especially along the road between Woolwich and Chat- 
ham, Charles Dickens had every opportunity of studying the genus 
tramp ; and this paper is the outcome of a close and accurate infor- 
mation which, to any one who knows the subject even fairly well, 
is absolutely marvellous in its truth. 

The old hall here described is Cobham Hall close to Gadshill, 
and the " ancient sign of the Crispin and Crispanus " is still to be 
found in the little town of Strood, hard by. 

" A cei'tain spell of work in a pleasant part of the country " was 
the boring of a well at Gadshill. " Here are six men perpetually 
going up and down the well (I know that somebody will be killed)," 
Charles Dickens w^rote to John Forster, " in the course of fitting a 
pump, which is quite a railway terminus — it is so iron and so big. 
The process is much more like putting Oxford Street endwise, and 
laying gas along it than anything else."] 

WAPPING WORKHOUSE. 

[Alas for "my little wooden midshipman"! — the little wooden 
midshipman of " Dombey and Son." He was taken away from 
the old shop in Leadenhall Street some few years after Charles 
Dickens's death, the house itself has been pulled doM^n, and there 
is nothing left there any more to suggest Sol Gills and Captain 
Cuttle. 



NOTES. XXV 

We have known many worse workhouses than that described 
here. It may, happily, be said that improvement in such matters 
has been steady, if a little slow, since the days of Mr. Bumble. 

Something — but not enough — has been done since this paper 
was written, in the direction of the equalisation of Poor's Rates.] 

NIGHT WALKS. 

[" The chopped-up, murdered man had not been lowered with a 
rope over the parapet when those nights were." A little while 
before this paper was written there had been found on one of the 
piers of Waterloo Bridge a bag containing the remains of a man 
who was naturally supposed to have been murdered. The thing 
made a great sensation for a long time, and such clothing as the 
bag also contained was examined by thousands of people at the 
Bow Street Police Station hard by. But it was at last pretty gen- 
erally agreed that the scientific manner in which the body had been 
cut up pointed rather to professional than to amateur work, and 
that the whole thing was a carefully planned and highly successful 
hoax on the part of some medical students. 

There has, by the bye, long ceased to be a toll-house or a toll- 
taker on Waterloo Bridge. There are no late public houses now. 
Newgate is still in existence, but they no longer hang people out- 
side the Debtors' Door ; the Courts of Law have been moved from 
Westminster to the east end of the Strand ; and the old King's 
Bench Prison ceased to exist, in that form, years ago. 

Of the wretched children who prowl about Covent Garden 
Market and its neighbourhood Charles Dickens wrote in " Our 
Mutual Friend," "There is a swarm of young savages always 
flitting about this same place, creeping off with fragments of 
orange-chests and mouldy litter — Heaven knows into what holes 
they can convey them, having no home ! — whose bare feet fall 
with a dull blunt softness on the pavement as the policeman hunts 
them, and who are (perhaps for that reason) little heard by the 
Powers that be, whereas in top-boots they would make a deafen- 
ing clatter." Another allusion to these wretched children in the 
"Uncommercial" paper, "The Short Timers," runs thus, "I can 
slip out of my door in the small hours after midnight ; and in one 
circuit of the piu'lieus of Covent Garden Market can behold a state 
of infancy and youth as vile as if a Bourbon sat upon the English 
throne ; a great police force looking on with authority to do no 
more than worry and hunt the dreadful vermin into corners, and 
there leave them." Unhappily a great deal still remains to be 
done in this direction. 

And see the " Uncommercial " paper " On an Amateur Beat."] 

CHAMBERS. 

[This paper, of course, at once recalls Jack Bamber and his 
stories of the old Inns — "those curious nooks in a great place," 
as Mr. Pickwick called them. 



xxvi THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

It may be noted that, although Gray's Inn Square still exists, it 
is greatly changed, while the Holborn Gate and the "old-estab- 
lished vendor of periodicals " have vanished utterly. Of the rest 
of " the shabby crew," the site of Lyons Inn is now occupied by 
the Globe Theatre, and the school of one of the great City Com- 
panies has taken possession of Barnard's Inn for the purpose of 
erecting new buildings. New Inn and Staple Inn are mainly 
occupied by solicitors, accountants and other people more or less 
connected with the law. Clement's Inn was quite recently pulled 
down. 

The subject of Chambers was always a favourite one with Charles 
Dickens. In writing to John Forster from Petersham, in 1839, 
about the periodical publication which he was even then contem- 
plating, and which had its ample development afterwards, in 
"Household Words" and "All the Year Round," he referred to a 
proposed series of " Chapters on Chambers," which I have long 
thought and spoken of."] 

BIRTH-DAY CELEBRATIONS. 

[" O, Olympia Squires ! " There is quite an autobiographical 
flavour about this reference to Olympia Squires. David Copper- 
field tells us how, in his early days at Dr. Strong's, he adored Miss 
Shepherd, a boarder at the Misses Nettingalls' establishment, and 
how, in his own room at home, he was " sometimes moved to cry 
out, ' O Miss Shepherd ! ' in a transport of love."] 

THE CITY OF THE ABSENT. 

[Very few of the old city churchyards remain, as in many cases, 
even where the churches have been left standing, the thoroughfares 
have taken possession of the churchyards. Garraway's Coffee 
House, which was once a famous place for auction sales, and almost 
equally celebrated for its sandwiches and sherry, has vanished, 
together with almost all the old coffee houses which were the 
customary meeting places of old-fashioned business men. Citj'- 
business methods and city refreshments of to-day alike demand 
big and showy new buildings, and nothing so inconvenient or 
picturesque as Garraway's old house, or so simple as Garraway's 
sherry and sandwiches is tolerated.] 

NOTE TO "ARCADIAN LONDON." 

[Charles Dickens had described Arcadian London, in a letter 
to the Honourable Mrs. Watson, of Rockingham Castle, as far 
back as the year 1853. " The other day I was in town," he said. 
" In case you should not have heard of the condition of that deserted 
village, I think it worth mentioning. All the streets of any note 
were unpaved, mountains high, and all the omnibuses were sliding 
down alleys, and looking into the upper windows of small houses. 
At eleven o'clock one morning 1 was positively alone in Bond 



NOTES. xxvii 

Street. I went to one of my tailors, and he was at Brighton. 
A smutty-faced woman among some gorgeous regimentals, half 
finished, had not the least idea when he would be back. I went 
to another of my tailors, and he was in an upper room, with open 
windows and surrounded by mignonette boxes, playing the piano 
in the bosom of his family. I went to my hosier's, and two of the 
least presentable of ' the young men ' of that elegant establishment 
were playing at drafts in the back shop. (Likewise I beheld a 
porter-pot hastily concealed under a Turkish dressing-gown of a 
golden pattern.) I then went wandering about to look for some 
ingenious portmanteau, and near the corner of St. James's Street 
saw a solitary being sitting in a trunk-shop, absorbed in a book 
which, on close inspection, I found to be ' Bleak House.' I thought 
this looked well, and went in. And he really was more interested 
in seeing me, when he knew who I was, than any face I had seen 
in any house, every house I knew being occupied by painters, 
including my own. I went to the Athenseum, that same night, to 
get my dinner, and it was shut up for repairs. I went home late, 
and had forgotten the key and was locked out."] 

THE BOILED BEEF OF NEW ENGLAND. 

[" The shabbiness of our English capital " is not so striking 
now as it was to Charles Dickens thirty-odd years ago, and it was, 
perhaps, never very fair to compare it with Liverpool, which was 
and is — in certain districts of the Exchange and Scotland divisions 
especially — worse than shabby, while there certainly can b4 no 
just comparison between a great city and such a little country 
place as Bury St. Edmunds, or such a comfortable and highly 
respectable cathedral town as Exeter. The London which Charles 
Dickens knew has, in fact, been improved almost out of recogni- 
tion. That the absence of any picturesque distinctive dress does 
make the mass of the people look shabby is, however, still to some 
extent true. 

The complaint of the absence of beer at the Whitechapel Cook- 
ing Depot would be quite as justifiable in speaking of similar 
establishments on a philanthropical basis to-day. The great Peo- 
ple's Palace at Mile-End has not succeeded half as well as a place 
of recreation as it ought to have done, solely because of the still 
rampant distrust of the working classes which assumes that the 
moderate consumption of beer must, sooner or later, lead to drunk- 
enness. Statesmen and fanatics of a certain type have not yet 
learnt that there is such a thing among the working classes as 
moderation; that "the drunken workman does not get drunk 
where he goes to eat and drink, but where he goes to drink — 
expressly to drink " ; and that the sober, moderate drinker bitterly 
resents being classed with the drunkards, and treated as if he were 
absolutely incapable of self-control. But it takes a wearily long 
time to teach some " statesmen" anything useful. 

And see the " Uncommercial " paper, " A Plea for Total Absti- 
nence," and " Frauds on the Fairies," in the " Reprinted Pieces."] 



THE 

UNCOMMERCIAL TRAYELLER. 

All the Year Round, Vol. 2, Wo. 40, Jan. 28, 1860. 

I. 

HIS GENERAL LINE OF BUSINESS. 

Allow me to introduce myself — first negatively. 

No landlord is my friend and brother, no chambermaid loves me, 
no waiter worships me, no boots admires and envies me. No round 
of beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie 
is especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally ad- 
dressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with greatcoats and rail- 
way wrappers is set apart for me, no house of public entertainment 
in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of its brandy 
or sherry. When I go upon my journeys, I am not usually rated 
at a low figure in the bill ; when I come home from my journeys, 
I never get any commission. I know nothing about prices, and 
should have no idea, if I were put to it, how to wheedle a man into 
ordering something he doesn't want. As a town traveller, I am 
never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and 
volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which a 
number of flat boxes are baking in layers. As a country traveller, 
I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered 
by a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station, 
quite a Druid in the midst of a light Stonehenge of samples. 

And yet — proceeding now, to introduce myself positively — I 
am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always 
on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house 
of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in 
the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering 
here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London — now 
about the city streets : now, about the country by-roads — seeing 
many little things, and some great things, which, because they 
interest me, I think may interest others. 

These are my brief credentials as the Uncommercial Traveller. 



2 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

All the Year Round, Vol. 2, iVo. 40, Jan. 28, 1860. 

II. 

THE SHIPWRECK. 

Never had I seen a year going out, or going on, under quieter 
circumstances. Eighteen hundred and fifty-nine had but another 
day to live, and truly its end was Peace on that sea-shore that 
morning. 

So settled and orderly was everything seaward, in the bright 
light of the sun and under the transparent shadows of the clouds, 
that it was hard to imagine the bay otherwise, for years past or to 
come, than it was that very day. The Tug-steamer lying a little 
off the shore, the Lighter lying still nearer to the shore, the boat 
alongside the Lighter, the regularly-turning windlass aboard the 
Lighter, the methodical figures at work, all slowly and regularly 
heaving up and down with the breathing of the sea, all seemed as 
much a part of the nature of the place as the tide itself. The 
tide was on the flow, and had been for some two hours and a half; 
there was a slight obstruction in the sea within a few yards of my 
feet : as if the stump of a tree, with earth enough about it to keep 
it from lying horizontally on the w^ater, had slipped a little from 
the land — and as I stood upon the beach and observed it dimpling 
the light swell that was coming in, I cast a stone over it. 

So orderly, so quiet, so regular — the rising and falling of the 
Tug-steamer, the Lighter, and the boat — the turning of the wind- 
lass — the coming in of the tide — that I myself seemed, to my 
own thinking, anything but new to the spot. Yet, I had never 
seen it in my life, a minute before, and had traversed two hundred 
miles to get at it. That very morning I had come bowling down, 
and struggling up, hill-country roads ; looking back at snowy sum- 
mits ; meeting courteous peasants well to do, driving fat pigs and 
cattle to market : noting the neat and thrifty dwellings, with their 
unusual quantity of clean w4iite linen, drying on the bushes ; hav- 
ing windy weather suggested by every cotter's little rick, with its 
thatched straw -ridged and extra straw-ridged into overlapping com- 
partments like the back of a rhinoceros. Had I not given a lift 
of fourteen miles to the Coast-guardsman (kit and all), who was 
coming to his spell of duty there, and had we not just now parted 
company ? So it was ; but the journey seemed to glide down into 
the placid sea, with other chafe and trouble, and for the moment 
nothing was so calmly and monotonously real under the sunlight 
as the gentle rising and falling of the water with its freight, the 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 3 

regular turning of the windlass aboard the Lighter, and the slight 
obstruction so very near my feet. 

reader, haply turning this page by the fireside at Home, and 
hearing the night wind rumble in the chimney, that slight obstruc- 
tion was the uppermost fragment of the Wreck of the Royal 
Charter, Australian trader and passenger ship. Homeward bound, 
that struck here on the terrible morning of the twenty-sixth of 
this October, broke into three parts, went down with her treasure 
of at least five hundred human lives, and has never stirred since ! 

From which point, or from which, she drove ashore, stern fore- 
most ; on which side, or on which, she passed the little Island in 
the bay, for ages henceforth to be aground certain yards outside 
her ; these are rendered bootless questions by the darkness of that 
night and the darkness of death. Here she went down. 

Even as I stood on the beach with the words " Here she went 
down ! " in my ears, a diver in his grotesque dress, dipped heavily 
over the side of the boat alongside the Lighter, and dropped to 
the bottom. On the shore by the water's edge, was a rough tent, 
made of fragments of wreck, where other divers and workmen 
sheltered themselves, and where they had kept Christmas-day with 
rum and roast beef, to the destruction of their frail chimney. 
Cast up among the stones and boulders of the beach, were great 
spars of the lost vessel, and masses of iron twisted by the fury of 
the sea into the strangest forms. The timber was already bleached 
and iron rusted, and even these objects did no violence to the pre- 
vailing air the whole scene wore, of having been exactly the same 
for years and years. 

Yet, only two short months had gone, since a man, living on the 
nearest hill-top overlooking the sea, being blown out of bed at 
about daybreak by the wind that had begun to strip his roof off, 
and getting upon a ladder with his nearest neighbour to construct 
some temporaiy device for keeping his house over his head, saw 
from the ladder's elevation as he looked down by chance towards 
the shore, some dark troubled object close in with the land. And 
he and the other, descending to the beach, and finding the sea 
mercilessly beating over a great broken ship, had clambered up the 
stony ways, like staircases without stairs, on which the wild village 
hangs in little clusters, as fruit hangs on boughs, and had given 
the alarm. And so, over the hill-slopes, and past the waterfall, 
and down the gullies where the land drains off into the ocean, the 
scattered quarrymen and fishermen inhabiting that part of Wales 
had come running to the dismal sight — their clergyman among 
them. And as they stood in the leaden morning, stricken with 
pity, leaning hard against the wind, their breath and vision often 



4 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

failing as the sleet and spray rushed at them from the ever forming 
and dissolving mountains of sea, and as the wool which was a part 
of the vessel's cargo blew in with the salt foam and remained upon 
the land when the foam melted, they saw the ship's life-boat put 
off from one of the heaps of wreck; and first, there were three 
men in her, and in a moment she capsized, and there were but two ; 
and again, she was struck by a vast mass of water, and there was 
but one; and again, she was thrown bottom upward, and that 
one, with his arm struck through the broken planks and waving 
as if for the help that could never reach him, went down into 
the deep. 

It was the clergyman himself from whom I heard this, while I 
stood on the shore, looking in his kind wholesome face as it turned 
to the spot where the boat had been. The divers were down then, 
and busy. They were "lifting" to-day the gold found yesterday 
— some five-and-twenty thousand pounds. Of three hundred and 
fifty thousand pounds' worth of gold, three hundred thousand 
pounds' worth, in round numbers, was at that time recovered. 
The great bulk of the remainder was surely and steadily coming up. 
Some loss of sovereigns there would be, of course ; indeed, at first 
sovereigns had drifted in with the sand, and been scattered far and 
wide over the beach, like sea-shells ; but most other golden treasure 
would be found. As it was brought up, it went aboard the Tug- 
steamer, where good account was taken of it. So tremendous had 
the force of the sea been when it broke the ship, that it had 
beaten one great ingot of gold, deep into a strong and heavy piece of 
her solid iron- work : in which, also, several loose sovereigns that the 
ingot had swept in before it, had been found, as firmly embedded 
as though the iron had been liquid when they were forced there. 
It had been remarked of such bodies come ashore, too, as had been 
seen by scientific men, that they had been stunned to death, and 
not suffocated. Observation, both of the internal change that had 
been wrought in them, and of their external expression, showed 
death to have been thus merciful and easy. The report was brought, 
while I was holding such discourse on the beach, that no more 
bodies had come ashore since last night. It began to be very 
doubtful whether many more would be thrown up, until the north- 
east winds of the early spring set in. Moreover, a great number 
of the passengers, and particularly the second-class women-passen- 
gers, were known to have been in the middle of the ship when she 
parted, and thus the collapsing wreck would have fallen upon them 
after yawning open, and would keep them down. A diver made 
known, even then, that he had come upon the body of a man, and 
had sought to release it from a great superincumbent weight; but 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 5 

that, finding he could not do so without mutilating the remains, he 
had left it where it was. 

It was the kind and wholesome face I have made mention of as 
being then beside me, that I had purposed to myself to see, when 
I left home for Wales. I had heard of that clergyman, as having 
buried many scores of the shipwrecked people ; of his having opened 
his house and heart to their agonised friends ; of his having used a 
most sweet and patient diligence for weeks and weeks, in the per- 
formance of the forlornest offices that Man can render to his kind ; 
of his having most tenderly and thoroughly devoted himself to the 
dead, and to those who were sorrowing for the dead. I had said 
to myself, " In the Christmas season of the year, I should like to 
see that man ! " And he had swung the gate of his little garden 
in coming out to meet me, not half an hour ago. 

So cheerful of spirit and guiltless of affectation, as true practical 
Christianity ever is ! I read more of the New Testament in the 
fresh frank face going up the village beside me, in five minutes, 
than I have read in anathematising discourses (albeit put to press 
with enormous flourishing of trumpets), in all my life. I heard 
more of the Sacred Book in the cordial voice that had nothing to 
say about its owner, than in all the would-be celestial pairs of 
bellows that have ever blown conceit at me. 

We climbed towards the little church, at a cheery pace, among 
the loose stones, the deep mud, the wet coarse grass, the outlying 
water, and other obstructions from which frost and snow had lately 
thawed. It was a mistake (my friend was glad to tell me, on the 
way) to suppose that the peasantry had shown any superstitious 
avoidance of the drowned ; on the whole, they had done very well, 
and had assisted readily. Ten shillings had been paid for the 
bringing of each body up to the church, but the way was steep, 
and a horse and cart (in which it was wrapped in a sheet) were 
necessary, and three or four men, and, all things considered, it was 
not a great price. The people were none the richer for the wreck, 
for it was the season of the herring-shoal — and who could cast 
nets for fish, and find dead men and women in the draught ? 

He had the church keys in his hand, and opened the churchyard 
gate, and opened the church door ; and we went in. 

It is a little church of great antiquity; there is reason to 
believe that some church has occupied the spot, these thousand 
years or more. The pulpit was gone, and other things usually 
belonging to the church were gone, owing to its living congregation 
having deserted it for the neighbouring school-room, and yielded it 
up to the dead. The very Commandments had been shouldered 
out of their places, in the bringing in of the dead ; the black wooden 



6 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

tables on which they were painted, were askew, and on the stone 
pavement below them, and on the stone pavement all over the 
church, were the marks and stains where the drowned had been 
laid down. The eye, with little or no aid from the imagination, 
could yet see how the bodies had been turned, and where the head 
had been and where the feet. Some faded traces of the wreck of 
the Australian ship may be discernible on the stone pavement of 
this little church, hundreds of years hence, when the digging for gold 
in Australia shall have long and long ceased out of the land. 

Forty-four shipwrecked men and women lay here at one time, 
awaiting burial. Here, with weeping and wailing in every room 
of his house, my companion worked alone for hours, solemnly sur- 
rounded by eyes that could not see him, and by lips that could 
not speak to him, patiently examining the tattered clothing, cutting 
off buttons, hair, marks from linen, anything that might lead to 
subsequent identification, studying faces, looking for a scar, a bent 
finger, a crooked toe, comparing letters sent to him with the ruin 
about him. "My dearest brother had bright grey eyes and a 
pleasant smile," one sister wrote. poor sister ! well for you to 
be far from here, and keep that as your last remembrance of him ! 

The ladies of the clergyman's family, his wife and two sisters-in- 
law, came in among the bodies often. It grew to be the business 
of their lives to do so. Any new arrival of a bereaved woman 
would stimulate their pity to compare the description brought, with 
the dread realities. Sometimes, they would go back able to say, 
"I have found him," or, "I think she lies there." Perhaps, the 
mourner, unable to bear the sight of all that lay in the church, 
would be led in blindfold. Conducted to the spot with many com- 
passionate words, and encouraged to look, she would say, with a 
piercing cry, " This is my boy ! " and drop insensible on the insen- 
sible figure. 

He soon observed that in some cases of women, the identifica- 
tion of persons, though complete, was quite at variance with the 
marks upon the linen ; this led him to notice that even the marks 
upon the linen were sometimes inconsistent with one another ; and 
thus he came to understand that they had dressed in great haste 
and agitation, and that their clothes had become mixed together. 
The identification of men by their dress, was rendered extremely 
difficult, in consequence of a large proportion of them being dressed 
alike — in clothes of one kind, that is to say, supplied by slop- 
sellers and outfitters, and not made by single garments but by hun- 
dreds. Many of the men were bringing over parrots, and had 
receipts upon them for the price of the birds ; others had bills of 
exchange in their pockets, or in belts. Some of these documents, 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 7 

carefully unwrinkled and dried, were little less fresh in appearance 
that day, than the present page will be under ordinary circum- 
stances, after having been opened three or four times. 

In that lonely place, it had not been easy to obtain even such 
common commodities in towns, as ordinary disinfectants. Pitch 
had been burnt in the church, as the readiest thing at hand, and 
the frying-pan in which it had bubbled over a brazier of coals was 
still there, with its ashes. Hard by the Communion-Table, were 
some boots that had been taken off the drowned and preserved — 
a gold-digger's boot, cut down the leg for its removal — a trodden- 
down man's ankle-boot with a buff cloth top — and others — 
soaked and sandy, weedy and salt. 

From the church, we passed out into the churchyard. Here, 
there lay, at that time, one hundred and forty-five bodies, that had 
come ashore from the wreck. He had buried them, when not 
identified, in graves containing four each. He had numbered 
each body in a register describing it, and had placed a correspond- 
ing number on each coffin, and over each grave. Identified bodies 
he had buried singly, in private graves, in another part of the 
churchyard. Several bodies had been exhumed from the graves of 
four, as relatives had come from a distance and seen his register ; 
and, when recognised, these have been reburied in private graves, 
so that the mourners might erect separate headstones over the 
remains. In all such cases he had performed the funeral service 
a second time, and the ladies of his house had attended. There 
had been no offence in the poor ashes when they were brought 
again to the light of day; the beneficent Earth had already 
absorbed it. The drowned were buried in their clothes. To sup- 
ply the great sudden demand for coffins, he had got all the neigh- 
bouring people handy at tools, to work the livelong day, and 
Sunday likewise. The coffins were neatly formed ; — I had seen 
two, waiting for occupants, under the lee of the ruined walls of a 
stone hut on the beach, within call of the tent where the Christ- 
mas Feast was held. Similarly, one of the graves for four was 
lying open and ready, here, in the churchyard. So much of the 
scanty space was already devoted to the wrecked people, that the 
villagers had begun to express uneasy doubts whether they them- 
selves could lie in their own ground, with their forefathers and 
descendants, by-and-bye. The churchyard being but a step from 
the clergyman's dwelhng-house, we crossed to the latter ; the white 
surplice was hanging up near the door ready to be put on at any 
time, for a funeral service. 

The cheerful earnestness of this good Christian minister was as 
consolatory, as the circumstances out of which it shone were sad. 



8 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

I never have seen anything more dehghtfully genuine than the 
cahn dismissal by himself and his household of all they had under- 
gone, as a simple duty that was quietly done and ended. In speak- 
ing of it, they spoke of it with great compassion for the bereaved ; 
but laid no stress upon their own hard share in those weary weeks, 
except as it had attached many people to them as friends, and 
elicited many touching expressions of gratitude. This clergyman's 
brother — himself the clergyman of two adjoining parishes, who had 
buried thirty-four of the bodies in his own churchyard, and who 
had done to them all that his brother had done as to the larger 
number — must be understood as included in the family. He was 
there, with his neatly arranged papers, and made no more account 
of his trouble than anybody else did. Down to yesterday's post 
outward, my clergyman alone had written one thousand and 
seventy-five letters to relatives and friends of the lost people. In 
the absence of self-assertion, it was only through my now and then 
delicately putting a question as the occasion arose, that I became 
informed of these things. It was only when I had remarked again 
and again, in the church, on the awful nature of the scene of 
death he had been required so closely to familiarise himself with 
for the soothing of the living, that he had casually said, without 
the least abatement of his cheerfulness, " indeed, it had rendered 
him unable for a time to eat or drink more than a little coffee now 
and then, and a piece of bread." 

In this noble modesty, in this beautiful simphcity, in this serene 
avoidance of the least attempt to " improve " an occasion which 
might be supposed to have sunk of its own weight into my heart, 
I seemed to have happily come, in a few steps, from the churchyard 
with its open grave, which was the type of Death, to the Christian 
dwelling side by side with it, which was the type of Eesurrection. 
I never shall think of the former, without the latter. The two 
will always rest side by side in my memory. If I had lost any 
one dear to me in this unfortunate ship, if I had made a voyage 
from Australia to look at the grave in the churchyard, I should 
go away, thankful to God that that house was so close to it, and 
that its shadow by day and its domestic lights by night fell upon 
the earth in which its Master had so tenderly laid my dear one's 
head. 

The references that naturally arose out of our conversation, to the 
descriptions sent down of shipwrecked persons, and to the gratitude 
of relations and friends, made me very anxious to see some of those 
letters. I was presently seated before a shipwreck of papers, all 
bordered with black, and from them I made the following few 
extracts. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 9 

A mother writes : 

Reverend Sir. Amongst the many who perished on your 
shore was numbered my beloved son. I was only just recovering 
from a severe illness, and this fearful affliction has caused a relapse, so 
that I am unable at present to go to identify the remains of the loved 
and lost. My darling son would have been sixteen on Christmas- 
day next. He was a most amiable and obedient child, early 
taught the way of salvation. We fondly hoped that as a British 
seaman he might be an ornament to his profession, but, "it is 
well ; " I feel assured my dear boy is now with the redeemed. Oh, 
he did not wish to go this last voyage ! On the fifteenth of October, 
I received a letter from him from Melbourne, date August twelfth ; 
he wrote in high spirits, and in conclusion he says : " Pray for a 
fair breeze, dear mamma, and I'll not forget to whistle for it ! and, 
God permitting, I shall see you and all my little pets again. Good 
bye, dear mother — good bye, dearest parents. Good bye, dear 
brother." Oh, it was indeed an eternal farewell. I do not apolo- 
gise for thus writing you, for oh, my heart is so very sorrowful. 

A husband writes : 

My dear kind Sir. Will you kindly inform me whether there 
are any initials upon the ring and guard you have in possession, 
found, as the Standard says, last Tuesday 1 Believe me, my dear 
sir, when I say that I cannot express my deep gratitude in words 
sufficiently for your kindness to me on that fearful and appalling 
day. Will you tell me what I can do for you, and will you write 
me a consoling letter to prevent my mind from going astray ? 

A widow writes : 

Left in such a state as I am, my friends and I thought it best 
that my dear husband should be buried where he lies, and, much 
as I should have liked to have had it otherwise, I must submit. 
I feel, from all I have heard of you, that you will see it done 
decently and in order. Little does it signify to us, when the soul 
has departed, where this poor body lies, but we who are left behind 
would do all we can to show how we loved them. This is denied 
me, but it is God's hand that afflicts us, and I try to submit. 
Some day I may be able to visit the spot, and see where he lies, 
and erect a simple stone to his memory. Oh ! it will be long, 
long before I forget that dreadful night ! Is there such a thing 
in the vicinity, or any shop in Bangor, to which I could send for 
a small picture of Moelfra or Llanallgo church, a spot now sacred 
to me? 



10 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Another widow writes : 

I have received your letter this morning, and do thank you most 
kindly for the interest you have taken about my dear husband, as 
well for the sentiments yours contains, evincing the spirit of a 
Christian who can sympathise with those who, like myself, are 
broken down with grief. 

May God bless and sustain you, and all in connection with you, 
in this great trial. Time may roll on and bear all its sons away, but 
your name as a disinterested person will stand in history, and, as 
successive years pass, many a widow will think of your noble con- 
duct, and the tears of gratitude flow down many a cheek, the trib- 
ute of a thankful heart, when other things are forgotten for ever. 

A father writes : 

I am at a loss to find words to sufficiently express my gratitude 
to you for your kindness to my son Richard upon the melancholy 
occasion of his visit to his dear brother's body, and also for your 
ready attention in pronouncing our beautiful burial service over 
my poor unfortunate son's remains. God grant that your prayers 
over him may reach the Mercy Seat, and that his soul may be 
received (through Christ's intercession) into heaven ! 

His dear mother begs me to convey to you her heartfelt thanks. 

Those who were received at the clergyman's house, write thus, 
after leaving it : 

Dear and never-to-be-forgotten Friends. I arrived here 
yesterday morning without accident, and am about to proceed to 
my home by railway. 

I am overpowered when I think of you and your hospitable 
home. No words could speak language suited to my heart. I 
refrain. God reward you with the same measure you have 
meted with! 

I enumerate no names, but embrace you all. 

My beloved Friends. This is the first day that I have been 
able to leave my bedroom since I returned, which will explain the 
reason of my not writing sooner. 

If I could only have had my last melancholy hope realised in 
recovering the body of my beloved and lamented son, I should have 
returned home somewhat comforted, and I think I could then have 
been comparatively resigned. 

I fear now there is but little prospect, and I mourn as one with- 
out hope. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 11 

The only consolation to my distressed mind is in having been so 
feelingly allowed by you to leave the matter in your hands, by 
whom I well know that everything will be done that can be, 
according to arrangements made before I left the scene of the 
awful catastrophe, both as to the identification of my dear son, and 
also his interment, 

I feel most anxious to hear whether anything fresh has tran- 
spired since I left you ; will you add another to the many deep obli- 
gations I am under to you by writing to me ? And should the 
body of my dear and unfortunate son be identified, let me hear 
from you immediately, and I will come again. 

Words cannot express the gratitude I feel I owe to you all for 
your benevolent aid, your kindness, and your sympathy. 

My dearly beloved Feiends. I arrived in safety at my 
house yesterday, and a night's rest has restored and tranquillised 
me. I must again repeat, that language has no words by which I 
can express my sense of obligation to you. You are enshrined in 
my heart of hearts. 

I have seen him ! and can now realise my misfortune more than 
I have hitherto been able to do. Oh, the bitterness of the cup I 
drink! But I bow submissive. God must have done right. I 
do not want to feel less, but to acquiesce more simply. 

There were some Jewish passengers on board the Royal Charter, 
and the gratitude of the Jewish people is feelingly expressed in 
the following letter bearing date from " the office of the Chief 
Rabbi:" 

Reverend Sir. I cannot refrain from expressing to you my heart- 
felt thanks on behalf of those of my flock whose relatives have un- 
fortunately been among those who perished at the late wreck of the 
Royal Charter. You have, indeed, like Boaz, " not left off your 
kindness to the living and the dead." 

You have not alone acted kindly towards the living by receiving 
them hospitably at your house, and energetically assisting them in 
their mournful duty, but also towards the dead, by exerting your- 
self to have our co-religionists buried in our ground, and according 
to our rites. May our heavenly Father reward you for your acts 
of humanity and true philanthropy ! 

The " Old Hebrew congregation of Liverpool " thus express 
theiiiselves through their secretary : 

Reverend Sir. The wardens of this congregation have 
learned with great pleasure that, in addition to those indefatigable 



12 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

exertions, at the scene of the late disaster to the Royal Charter, 
which have received universal recognition, you have very benevo- 
lently employed your valuable efforts to assist such members of 
our faith as have sought the bodies of lost friends to give them 
burial in our consecrated grounds, with the observances and rites 
prescribed by the ordinances of our religion. 

The wardens desire me to take the earliest available opportu- 
nity to offer to you, on behalf of our community, the expression of 
their warm acknowledgments and grateful thanks, and their sincere 
wishes for your continued welfare and prosperity. 

A Jewish gentleman writes : 

Reverend and dear Sir. I take the opportunity of thank- 
ing you right earnestly for the promptness you displayed in answer- 
ing my note with full particulars concerning my much lamented 
brother, and I also herein beg to express my sincere regard for the 
willingness you displayed and for the facility you afforded for get- 
ting the remains of my poor brother exhumed. It has been to us 
a most sorrowful and painful event, but when we meet with such 
friends as yourself, it in a measure, somehow or other, abates that 
mental anguish, and makes the suffering so much easier to be borne. 
Considering the circumstances connected with my poor brother's 
fate, it does, indeed, appear a hard one. He had been away in all 
seven years; he returned four years ago to see his family. He 
was then engaged to a very amiable young lady. He had been 
very successful abroad, and was now returning to fulfil his sacred 
vow; he brought all his property with him in gold uninsured. 
We heard from him when the ship stopped at Queenstown, when 
he was in the highest of hope, and in a few short hours afterwards 
all was washed away. 

Mournful in the deepest degree, but too sacred for quotation 
here, were the numerous references to those miniatures of women 
worn round the necks of rough men (and found there after death), 
those locks of hair, those scraps of letters, those many many slight 
memorials of hidden tenderness. One man cast up by the sea 
bore about him, printed on a perforated lace card, the following 
singular (and unavailing) charm : 

A blessing. 

May the blessing of God await thee. May the sun of glory 
shine around thy bed ; and may the gates of plenty, honour, *and 
happiness be ever open to thee. May no sorrow distress thy days ; 
may no grief disturb thy nights. May the pillow of peace kiss thy 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 13 

cheek, and the pleasures of imagination attend thy dreams ; and 
when length of years makes thee tired of earthly joys, and the cur- 
tain of death gently closes around thy last sleep of human existence, 
may the Angel of God attend thy bed, and take care that the ex- 
piring lamp of life shall not receive one rude blast to hasten on its 
extinction. 

A sailor had these devices on his right arm. " Our Saviour on 
the Cross, the forehead of the Crucifix and the vesture stained red ; 
on the lower part of the arm, a man and woman ; on one side of 
the Cross, the appearance of a half moon, with a face ; on the other 
side, the sun ; on the top of the Cross, the letters I. H. S. ; on 
the left arm, a man and woman dancing, with an efi"ort to delineate 
the female's dress; under which, initials." Another seaman "had, 
on the lower part of the right arm, the device of a sailor and a 
female; the man holding the Union Jack with a streamer, the 
folds of which waved over her head, and the end of it was held in 
her hand. On the upper part of the arm, a device of Our Lord on 
the Cross, with stars surrounding the head of the Cross, and one 
large star on the side in Indian ink. On the left arm, a flag, a 
true lover's knot, a face, and initials." This tattooing was found 
still plain, below the discoloured outer surface of a mutilated arm, 
when such surface was carefully scraped away with a knife. It is 
not improbable that the perpetuation of this marking custom 
among seamen, may be referred back to their desire to be identified, 
if drowned and flung ashore. 

It was some time before I could sever myself from the many 
interesting papers on the table, and then I broke bread and drank 
wine with the kind family before I left them. As I brought the 
Coast-guard down, so I took the Postman back, with his leathern 
waUet, walking stick, bugle, and terrier dog. Many a heart- 
broken letter had he brought to the Rectory House within two 
months ; many a benignantly painstaking answer had he carried 
back. 

As I rode along, I thought of the many people, inhabitants of 
this mother country, who would make pilgrimages to the little 
churchyard in the years to come ; I thought of the many people in 
Australia, who would have an interest in such a shipwreck, and 
would find their way here when they visit the Old World; I 
thought of the writers of all the wreck of letters I had left upon 
the table ; and I resolved to place this little record where it stands. 
Convocations, Conferences, Diocesan Epistles, and the like, will do 
a great deal for Religion, I dare say, and Heaven send they may ! 
but I doubt if they will ever do their Master's service half so well, 



14 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

in all the time they last, as the Heavens have seen it done in this 
bleak spot upon the rugged coast of Wales. 

Had I lost the friend of my life, in the wreck of the Royal Char- 
ter ; had I lost my betrothed, the more than friend of my life ; had 
I lost my maiden daughter, had I lost my hopeful boy, had I lost 
my little child ; I would kiss the hands that worked so busily and 
gently in the church, and say, "None better could have touched 
the form, though it had lain at home." I could be sure of it, I 
could be thankful for it : I could be content to leave the grave 
near the house the good family pass in and out of every day, undis- 
turbed, in the little churchyard where so many are so strangely 
brought together. 

Without the name of the clergyman to whom — I hope, not 
without carrying comfort to some heart at some time — I have 
referred, my reference would be as nothing. He is the Reverend 
Stephen Roose Hughes, of Llanallgo, near Moelfra, Anglesey. His 
brother is the Reverend Hugh Robert Hughes, of Penrhos, Alligwy. 



All the Year Bound, Vol. 2, Mo. 43, Feb. 18, 18G0. 

III. 
WAPPING WORKHOUSE. 

My day's no-business beckoning me to the East end of London, 
I had turned my face to that point of the metropolitan compass on 
leaving Covent-garden, and had got past the Indian House, think- 
ing in my idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had 
got past my little wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting 
him on one leg of his knee-shorts for old acquaintance' sake, and 
had got past Aldgate Pump, and had got past the Saracen's Head 
(with an ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his swarthy 
countenance), and had strolled up the empty yard of his ancient 
neighbour the Black or Blue Boar, or Bull, who departed this life 
I don't know when, and whose coaches are all gone I don't know 
where ; and I had come out again into the age of railways, and I 
had got past Whitechapel Church, and was — rather inappropriately 
for an Uncommercial Traveller — in the Commercial Road. Pleas- 
antly wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and 
greatly enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar 
refiners, the little masts and vanes in small back gardens in back 
streets, the neighbouring canals and docks, the India vans lumber- 
ing along their stone tramway, and the pawnbrokers' shops where 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 15 

hard-up Mates had pawned so many sextants and quadrants, that 
I should have bought a few cheap if I had the least notion how 
to use them, I at last began to file off to the right, towards 
Wapping. 

Not that I intended to take boat at Wapping Old Stairs, or that 
I was going to look at the locality, because I believe (for I don't) 
in the constancy of the young woman who told her sea-going lover, 
to such a beautiful old tune, that she had ever continued the same, 
since she gave him the 'baccer-box marked with his name ; I am 
afraid he usually got the worst of those transactions, and was fright- 
fully taken in. No, I was going to Wapping, because an Eastern 
police magistrate had said, through the morning papers, that there 
was no classification at the Wapping workhouse for women, and 
that it was a disgrace and a shame, and divers other hard names, 
and because I wished to see how the fact really stood. For, that 
Eastern police magistrates are not always the wisest men of the 
East, may be inferred from their course of procedure respecting the 
fancy-dressing and pantomime-posturing at St. George's in that quar- 
ter : which is usually, to discuss the matter at issue, in a state of 
mind betokening the weakest perplexity, with all parties concerned 
and unconcerned, and, for a final expedient, to consult the complain- 
ant as to what he thinks ought to be done with the defendant, and 
take the defendant's opinion as to what he would recommend to be 
done with himself. 

Long before I reached Wapping, I gave myself up as having lost 
my way, and, abandoning myself to the narrow streets in a Turkish 
frame of mind, relied on predestination to bring me somehow or 
other to the place I wanted if I were ever to get there. When I 
had ceased for an hour or so to take any trouble about the matter, 
I found myself on a swing-bridge looking down at some dark locks 
in some dirty water. Over against me, stood a creature remotely 
in the likeness of a young man, with a puffed sallow face, and a 
figure all dirty and shiny and slimy, who may have been the young- 
est son of his filthy old father, Thames, or the drowned man about 
whom there was a placard on the granite post like a large thimble, 
that stood between us. 

I asked this apparition what it called the place ? Unto which, 
it replied, with a ghastly grin and a sound like gurghng water in 
its throat : 

"Mr. Baker's trap." 

As it is a point of great sensitiveness with me on such occasions 
to be equal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation, I deeply 
considered the meaning of this speech, while I eyed the apparition 
— then engaged in hugging and sucking a horizontal iron bar at 



16 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

the top of the locks. Inspiration suggested to me that Mr. Baker 
was the acting coroner of that neighbourhood. 

"A common place for suicide," said I, looking down at the locks. 

" Sue 1 " returned the ghost, with a stare. " Yes ! And Poll. 
Likewise Emily. And Nancy. And Jane ; " he sucked the iron 
between each name; "and all the bileing. Ketches off their bon- 
nets or shorls, takes a run, and headers down here, they doos. 
Always a headerin' down here, they is. Like one o'clock." 

" And at about that hour of the morning, I suppose 1 " 

"Ah ! " said the apparition. " Thei/ an't partickler. Two 'ull 
do for them. Three. All times o' night. On'y mind you ! " Here 
the apparition rested his profile on the bar, and gurgled in a sarcas- 
tic manner. " There must be somebody comin'. They don't go a 
headerin' down here, wen there an't no Bobby nor gen'ral Cove, fur 
to hear the splash." 

According to my interpretation of these words, I was myself a 
General Cove, or member of the miscellaneous public. In which 
modest character I remarked : 

"They are often taken out, are they, and restored?" 

"I dunno about restored," said the apparition, who, for some 
occult reason, very much objected to that word; "they're carried 
into the werkiss and put into a 'ot bath, and brought round. But 
I dunno about restored," said the apparition ; "blow that/" — and 
vanished. 

As it had shown a desire to become offensive, I was not sorry to 
find myself alone, especially as the " werkiss " it had indicated with 
a twist of its matted head, was close at hand. So I left Mr. Baker's 
terrible trap (baited with a scum that was like the soapy rinsing 
of sooty chimneys), and made bold to ring at the workhouse gate, 
where I was wholly unexpected and quite unknown. 

A very bright and nimble little matron, with a bunch of keys in 
her hand, responded to my request to see the House. I began to 
doubt whether the police magistrate was quite right in his facts, 
when I noticed her quick active little figure and her intelligent 
eyes. 

The Traveller (the matron intimated) should see the worst first. 
He was welcome to see everything. Such as it was, there it all 
was. 

This was the only preparation for our entering " the Foul wards." 
They were in an old building squeezed away in a corner of a paved 
yard, quite detached from the more modern and spacious main body 
of the workhouse. They were in a building most monstrously be- 
hind the time — a mere series of garrets or lofts, with every incon- 
venient and objectionable circumstance in their construction, and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 17 

only accessible by steep and narrow staircases, infamously ill-adapted 
for the passage up-stairs of the sick or down-stairs of the dead. 

A-bed in these miserable rooms, here on bedsteads, there (for a 
change, as I understood it) on the floor, were women in every stage 
of distress and disease. Kone but those who have attentively ob- 
served such scenes, can conceive the extraordinary variety of ex- 
pression still latent under the general monotony and uniformity of 
colour, attitude, and condition. The form a little coiled up and 
turned away, as though it had turned its back on this world for 
ever ; the uninterested face at once lead-coloured and yellow, look- 
ing passively upward from the pillow ; the haggard mouth a little 
dropped, the hand outside the coverlet, so dull and indifferent, so 
light, and yet so heavy ; these were on every pallet ; but when I 
stopped beside a bed, and said ever so slight a word to the figure 
lying there, the ghost of the old character came into the face, and 
made the Foul ward as various as the fair world. No one appeared 
to care to live, but no one complained ; all who could speak, said 
that as much was done for them as could be done there, that the 
attendance was kind and patient, that their suffering was very 
heavy, but they had nothing to ask for. The wretched rooms 
were as clean and sweet as it is possible for such rooms to be ; they 
would become a pest-house in a single week, if they were ill-kept. 

I accompanied the brisk matron up another barbarous staircase, 
into a better kind of loft devoted to the idiotic and imbecile. 
There was at least Light in it, whereas the windows in the former 
wards had been like sides of schoolboys' bird-cages. There was a 
strong grating over the fire here, and, holding a kind of state on 
either side of the hearth, separated by the breadth of this grating, 
were two old ladies in a condition of feeble dignity, which was 
surely the very last and lowest reduction of self-complacency, to be 
found in this wonderful humanity of ours. They were evidently 
jealous of each other, and passed their whole time (as some people 
do, whose fires are not grated) in mentally disparaging each other, 
and contemptuously watching their neighbours. One of these 
parodies on provincial gentlewomen was extremely talkative, and 
expressed a strong desire to attend the service on Sundays, from 
which she represented herself to have derived the greatest interest 
and consolation when allowed that privilege. She gossiped so well, 
and looked altogether so cheery and harmless, that I began to think 
this a case for the Eastern magistrate, until I found that on the 
last occasion of her attending chapel she had secreted a small stick, 
and had caused some confusion in the responses by suddenly produc- 
ing it and belabouring the congregation. 

So, these two old ladies, separated by the breadth of the grating 



18 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

— otherwise they would fly at one another's caps — sat all day long, 
suspecting one another, and contemplating a world of fits. For, 
everybody else in the room had fits, except the wards- woman ; an 
elderly, able-bodied pauperess, with a large upper lip, and an air of 
repressing and saving her strength, as she stood with her hands 
folded before her, and her eyes slowly rolling, biding her time for 
catching or holding somebody. This civil personage (in whom I 
regretted to identify a reduced member of my honourable friend 
Mrs. Gamp's family) said, " They has 'em continiwal, sir. They 
drops without no more notice than if they was coach-horses 
dropped from the moon, sir. And when one drops, another drops, 
and sometimes there'll be as many as four or five on 'em at once, 
dear me, a rolling and a tearin', bless you ! — this young woman, 
now, has 'em dreadful bad." 

She turned up this young woman's face with her hand as she 
said it. This young woman was seated on the floor, pondering in 
the foreground of the afflicted. There was nothing repellent either 
in her face or head. Many, apparently worse, varieties of epilepsy 
and hysteria were about her, but she was said to be the worst 
here. When I had spoken to her a little, she still sat with her 
face turned up, pondering, and a gleam of the mid-day sun shone in 
upon her. 

— Whether this young woman, and the rest of these so sorely 
troubled, as they sit or lie pondering in their confused dull way, 
ever get mental glimpses among the motes in the sunlight, of healthy 
people and healthy things ? Whether this young woman, brooding 
like this in the summer season, ever thinks that somewhere there 
are trees and flowers, even mountains and the great sea? Whether, 
not to go so far, this young woman ever has any dim revelation of 
that young woman — that young woman who is not here and never 
will come here ; who is courted, and caressed, and loved, and has a 
husband, and bears children, and lives in a home, and who never 
knows what it is to have this lashing and tearing coming upon her ? 
And whether this young w^oman, God help her, gives herself up 
then and drops like a coach-horse from the moon 1 

I hardly knew whether the voices of infant children, penetrating 
into so hopeless a place, made a sound that was pleasant or painful 
to me. It was something to be reminded that the weary world 
was not all aweary, and was ever renewing itself; but, this young 
woman was a child not long ago, and a child not long hence might 
be such as she. Howbeit, the active step and eye of the vigilant 
matron conducted me past the two provincial gentlewomen (whose 
dignity was ruffled by the children), and into the adjacent nursery. 

There were many babies here, and more than one handsome 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 19 

younc^ mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen 
young mothers, and callous young mothers. But, the babies had 
not appropriated to themselves any bad expression yet, and might 
have been for anything that appeared to the contrary m their soft 
faces. Princes Imperial, and Princesses Royal. I had the pleasure 
of givino- a poetical commission to the baker's man to make a cake 
with alfdespatch and toss it into the oven for one red-headed young 
pauper and myself, and felt much the better for it. Without that 
refreshment, I doubt if I should have been in a condition for ''the 
Refractories," towards whom my quick little matron — for whose 
adaptation to her office I had by this time conceived a genuine re- 
spect — drew me next, and marshalled me the way that I was going. 
The Refractories were picking oakum, in a small room giving on 
a yard They sat in line on a form, with their backs to a window ; 
before them, a table, and their work. The oldest Refractory was, 
say twenty; youngest Refractory, say sixteen. I have never yet 
ascertained in the course of my uncommercial travels, why a Refrac- 
tory habit should affect the tonsils and u\Tila ; but, I have always 
observed that Refractories of both sexes and every grade, between 
a Ragged School and the Old Bailey, have one voice, in which the 
tonsifs and uvula gain a diseased ascendency. ^^ 

" Five pound indeed ! I hain't a going fur to pick five pound, 
said the Chief of the Refractories, keeping time to herself with her 
head and chin. "More than enough to pick what we picks now, 
in sich a place as this, and on wot we gets here ! " 

(This was in acknowledgment of a delicate inrimarion that the 
amount of work was likely to be increased. It certainly was not 
heavy then, for one Refractory had already done her day's task — 
it was barely two o'clock — and was sitting behind it, with a head 
exactly matching it.) 

" A pretty Oase this is, matron, ain't it ? " said Refractory Two, 
" where a pleeseman's called in, if a gal says a word ! " ^ 

" And wen you're sent to prison for nothink or less ! "^ said the 
Chief, tugging at her oakum as if it were the matron's hair. " But 
any place^is better than this ; that's one thing, and be thankful ! " 

A laugh of Refractories led by Oakum Head with folded arms — 
who ori^nated nothing, but who was in command of the skirmishers 
outside the conversation. 

" If any place is better than this," said my brisk guide, m the 
calmest manner, "it is a pity you left a good place when you had 



one. 



" Ho, no, I didn't, matron," returned the Chief, with another pull 
at her oakum, and a very expressive look at the enemy's forehead. 
" Don't say that, matron, cos it's lies ! " 



20 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Oakum Head brought up the skirmishers again, skirmished, and 
retired. 

"And / warn't a going," exclaimed Refractory Two, " though I 
was in one place for as long as four year — / warn't a going fur to 
stop in a place that warn't fit for me — there ! And where the 
family warn't 'spectable characters — there ! And where I fort'- 
nately or hunfort'nately, found that the people warn't what they 
pretended to make theirselves out to be — there ! And where it 
wasn't their faults, by chalks, if I warn't made bad and ruinated 
— Hah ! " 

During this speech, Oakum Head had again made a diversion 
with the skirmishers, and had again withdrawn. 

The Uncommercial Traveller ventured to remark that he sup- 
posed Chief Refractory and Number One, to be the two young 
women who had been taken before the magistrate ? 

" Yes ! " said the Chief, " we har ! and the wonder is, that a 
pleeseman an't 'ad in now, and we took off agen. You can't open 
your lips here, without a pleeseman." 

Number Two laughed (very uvularly), and the skirmishers fol- 
lowed suit. 

" I'm sure I'd be thankful," protested the Chief, looking side- 
ways at the Uncommercial, "if I could be got into a place, or got 
abroad. I'm sick and tired of this precious Ouse, I am, with 
reason." 

So would be, and so was, Number Two. So would be, and so 
was, Oakum Head. So would be, and so were, Skirmishers. 

The Uncommercial took the liberty of hinting that he hardly 
thought it probable that any lady or gentleman in want of a likely 
young domestic of retiring manners, would be tempted into the 
engagement of either of the two leading Refractories, on her own 
presentation of herself as per sample. 

"It ain't no good being nothink else here," said the Chief. 

The Uncommercial thought it might be worth trying. 

"Oh no it ain't," said the Chief. 

" Not a bit of good," said Number Two. 

"And I'm sure I'd be very thankful to be got into a place, or 
got abroad," said the Chief. 

"And so should I," said Number Two. "Truly thankful, I 
should." 

Oakum Head then rose, and announced as an entirely new idea, 
the mention of which profound novelty might be naturally expected 
to startle her unprepared hearers, that she would be very thankful 
to be got into a place, or got abroad. And, as if she had then said, 
" Chorus, ladies ! " aU the skirmishers struck up to the same 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 21 

purpose. We left them, thereupon, and began a long walk among 
the women who were simply old and infirm ; but whenever, in the 
course of this same walk, I looked out of any high window that 
commanded the yard, I saw Oakum Head and all the other Refrac- 
tories looking out at their low window for me, and never failing to 
catch me, the moment I showed my head. 

In ten minutes I had ceased to believe in such fables of a golden 
time as youth, the prime of life, or a hale old age. In ten minutes, 
all the lights of womankind seemed to have been blown out, and 
nothing in that way to be left this vault to brag of, but the flicker- 
ing and expiring snuffs. 

And what was very curious, was, that these dim old women 
had one company notion which was the fashion of the place. 
Every old woman who became aware of a visitor and was not in 
bed hobbled over a form into her accustomed seat, and became one 
of a line of dim old women confronting another line of dim old 
women across a narrow table. There was no obligation whatever 
upon them to range themselves in this way ; it was their manner 
of "receiving." As a rule, they made no attempt to talk to one 
another, or to look at the visitor, or to look at anything, but sat 
silently working their mouths, like a sort of poor old Cows. In 
some of these wards, it was good to see a few green plants ; in 
others, an isolated Refractory acting as nurse, who did well enough 
in that capacity, when separated from her compeers ; every one of 
these wards, day room, night room, or both combined, was scrupu- 
lously clean and fresh. I have seen as many such places as most 
travellers in my line, and I never saw one such, better kept. 

Among the bedridden there was great patience, great reliance 
on the books under the pillow, great faith in God. All cared for 
sympathy, but none much cared to be encouraged with hope of 
recovery ; on the whole, I should say, it was considered rather a 
distinction to have n complication of disorders, and to be in a 
worse way than the rest. From some of the windows, the river 
could be seen with all its life and movement ; the day was bright, 
but I came upon no one who was looking out. 

In one large ward, sitting by the fire in arm-chairs of distinction, 
like the President and Vice of the good company, were two old 
women, upwards of ninety years of age. The younger of the two, 
just turned ninety, was deaf, but not very, and could easily be 
made to hear. In her early time she had nursed a child, who was 
now another old woman, more infirm than herself, inhabiting the 
very same chamber. She perfectly understood this when the 
matron told it, and, with sundry nods and motions of her forefin- 
ger, pointed out the woman in question. The elder of this pair, 



22 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

ninety-three, seated before an illustrated newspaper (but not read- 
ing it), was a bright-eyed old soul, really not deaf, wonderfully 
preserved, and amazingly conversational. She had not long lost 
her husband, and had been in that place little more than a year. 
At Boston, in the State of Massachusetts, this poor creature would 
have been individually addressed, would have been tended in her 
own room, and would have had her life gently assimilated to a 
comfortable life out of doors. Would that be much to do in Eng- 
land for a woman who has kept herself out of a workhouse more 
than ninety rough long years? When Britain first, at Heaven's 
command, arose, with a great deal of allegorical confusion, from 
out the azure main, did her guardian angels positively forbid it in 
the Charter which has been so much besung ? 

The object of my journey was accomplished when the nimble 
matron had no more to show me. As I shook hands with her at 
the gate, I told her that I thought Justice had not used her very 
well, and that the wise men of the East were not infallible. 

Now, I reasoned with myself, as I made my journey home again, 
concerning those Foul wards. They ought not to exist ; no per- 
son of common decency and humanity can see them and doubt it. 
But what is this Union to do ? The necessary alteration would 
cost several thousands of pounds ; it has already to support three 
workhouses; its inhabitants work hard for their bare lives, and 
are already rated for the relief of the Poor to the utmost extent 
of reasonable endurance. One poor parish in this very Union is 
rated to the amount of Five and sixpence in the pound, at the 
very same time when the rich parish of Saint George's, Hanover- 
sqr.are, is rated at about Sevenpence in the pound, Paddingtori 
at about Fourpence, Saint James's, Westminster, at about Ten- 
pence ! It is only through the equalisation of Poor Rates that 
what is left undone in this wise, can be done. Much more is left 
undone, or is ill-done, than I have space to suggest in these notes 
of a single uncommercial journey ; but, the wise men of the East, 
before they can reasonably hold forth about it, must look to the 
North and South and West; let them also, any morning before 
taking the seat of Solomon, look into the shops and dwellings all 
around the Temple, and first ask themselves "how much more 
can these poor people — many of whom keep themselves with dif- 
ficulty enough out of the workhouse — bear ? " 

I had yet other matter for reflection as I journeyed home, inas- 
much as, before I altogether departed from the neighbourhood of 
Mr. Baker's trap, I had knocked at the gate of the workhouse of 
St. George's-in-the-East, and had found it to be an establishment 
highly creditable to those parts, and thoroughly well administered 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 23 

by a most intelligent master. I remarked in it, an instance of the 
collateral harm that obstinate vanity and folly can do. "This 
was the Hall where those old paupers, male and female, whom I 
had just seen, met for the Church service, was it?" — "Yes." — 
"Did they sing the Psalms to any instrument?" — "They would 
like to, very much ; they would have an extraordinary interest in 
doing so." — "And could none be got?" — "Well, a piano could 
even have been got for nothing, but these unfortunate dissensions 
" Ah ! better, far better, my Christian friend in the beauti- 
ful garment, to have let the singing boys alone, and left the mul- 
titude to sing for themselves ! You should know better than I, 
but I think I have read that they did so, once upon a time, and 
that " when they had sung an hymn," Some one (not in a beauti- 
ful garment) went up unto the Mount of Olives. 

It made my heart ache to think of this miserable trifling, in the 
streets of a city where every stone seemed to call to me, as I 
walked along, " Turn this way, man, and see what waits to be 
done ! " So I decoyed myself into another train of thought to ease 
my heart. But, I don't know that I did it, for I was so full of 
paupers, that it was, after all, only a change to a single pauper, 
who took possession of my remembrance instead of a thousand. 

" I beg your pardon, sir," he had said, in a confidential manner, 
on another occasion, taking me aside; "but I have seen better 
days." 

" I am very sorry to hear it." 

" Sir, I have a complaint to make against the master." 

"I have no power here, I assure you. And if I had " 

" But allow me, sir, to mention it, as between yourself and a 
man who has seen better days, sir. The master and myself are both 
masons, sir, and I make him the sign continually ; but, because I 
am in this unfortunate position, sir, he won't give me the counter- 
sign ! " 



All the Year Round, Vol. 2, Wo. 44, Feb. 25, 1860. 

IV. 

TWO VIEWS OF A CHEAP THEATKE. 

As I shut the door of my lodging behind me, and came out into 
the streets at six on a drizzling Saturday evening in the last past 
month of January, all that neighbourhood of Covent-garden looked 
very desolate. It is so essentially a 'neighbourhood which has seen 
better days, that bad weather affects it sooner than another place 



24 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

which has not come down in the world. In its present reduced 
condition it bears a thaw ahnost worse than any place I know. It 
gets so dreadfully low-spirited when damp breaks forth. Those 
wonderful houses about Drury-lane Theatre, which in the palmy 
days of theatres were prosperous and long-settled places of business, 
and which now change hands every week, but never change their 
character of being divided and sub-divided on the ground floor into 
mouldy dens of shops where an orange and half-a-dozen nuts, or a 
pomatum-pot, one cake of fancy soap, and a cigar box, are offered 
for sale and never sold, were most ruefully contemplated that even- 
ing, by the statue of Shakespeare, with the rain-drops coursing one 
another down its innocent nose. Those inscrutable pigeon-hole 
offices, with nothing in them (not so much as an inkstand) but a 
model of a theatre before the curtain, where, in the Italian Opera 
season, tickets at reduced prices are kept on sale by nomadic 
gentlemen in smeary hats too tall for them, whom one occasionally 
seems to have seen on race-courses, not wholly unconnected with 
strips of cloth of various colours and a rolling ball — those Bed- 
ouin establishments, deserted by the tribe, and tenantless, except 
when sheltering in one corner an irregular row of ginger-beer-bot- 
tles, which would have made one shudder on such a night, but for its 
being plain that they had nothing in them, shrunk from the shrill 
cries of the newsboys at their Exchange in the kennel of Catherine- 
street, like guilty things upon a fearful summons. At the pipe- 
shop in Great Russell-street, the Death's-head pipes were like 
theatrical memento mori, admonishing beholders of the decline of 
the playhouse as an Institution. I walked up Bow-street, disposed 
to be angry with the shops there, that were letting out theatrical 
secrets by exhibiting to work-a-day humanity the stuff" of which 
diadems and robes of kings are made. I noticed that some shops 
which had once been in the dramatic line, and had struggled out of 
it, were not getting on prosperously — like some actors I have known, 
who took to business and failed to make it answer. In a word, 
those streets looked so dull, and, considered as theatrical streets, so 
broken and bankrupt, that the Found Dead on the black board 
at the police station might have announced the decease of the 
Drama, and the pools of water outside the fire-engine makers at 
the corner of Long-acre might have been occasioned by his having 
brought out the whole of his stock to play upon its last smoulder- 
ing ashes. 

And yet, on such a night in so degenerate a time, the object of 
my journey was theatrical. And yet within half an hour I was 
in an immense theatre, capable of holding nearly five thousand 
people. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 25 

What Theatre? Her Majesty's? Far better. Royal Italian 
Opera 1 Far better. Infinitely superior to the latter for hearing 
in ; infinitely superior to both, for seeing in. To every part of this 
Theatre, spacious fire-proof ways of ingress and egress. For every 
part of it, convenient places of refreshment and retiring rooms. 
Everything to eat and drink carefully supervised as to quality, and 
sold at an appointed price ; respectable female attendants ready for 
the commonest women in the audience ; a general air of considera- 
tion, decorum, and supervision, most commendable ; an unquestion- 
ably humanising influence in all the social arrangements of the 
place. 

Surely a dear Theatre, then 1 Because there were in London 
(not very long ago) Theatres with entrance-prices up to half-a- 
guinea a head, whose arrangements were not half so civilised. 
Surely, therefore, a dear Theatre 1 Not very dear. A gallery at 
threepence, another gallery at fourpence, a pit at sixpence, boxes 
and pit-stalls at a shilling, and a few private-boxes at half-a-crown. 

My uncommercial curiosity induced me to go into every nook of 
this great place, and among every class of the audience assembled 
in it — amounting that evening, as I calculated, to about two 
thousand and odd hundreds. Magnificently lighted by a firma- 
ment of sparkling chandeliers, the building was ventilated to per- 
fection. My sense of smell, without being particularly delicate, 
has been so offended in some of the commoner places of public 
resort, that I have often been obliged to leave them when I have made 
an uncommercial journey expressly to look on. The air of this 
Theatre w^as fresh, cool, and wholesome. To help towards this end, 
very sensible precautions had been used, ingeniously combining the 
experience of hospitals and railway stations. Asphalt pavements 
substituted for wooden floors, honest bare walls of glazed brick and 
tile — even at the back of the boxes — for plaster and paper, no 
benches stuff'ed, and no carpeting or baize used ; a cool material with 
a light glazed surface, being the covering of the seats. 

These various contrivances are as well considered in the place 
in question as if it were a Fever Hospital ; the result is, that it is 
sweet and healthful. It has been constructed from the ground to 
the roof, with a careful reference to sight and sound in every cor- 
ner; the result is, that its form is beautiful, and that the appear- 
ance of the audience, as seen from the proscenium — with every 
face in it commanding the stage, and the whole so admirably raked 
and turned to that centre, that a hand can scarcely move in the 
great assemblage without the movement being seen from thence — 
is highly remarkable in its union of vastness with compactness. 
The stage itself, and all its appurtenances of machinery, cellarage 



26 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

height and breadth, are on a scale more like the Scala at Milan, or 
the San Carlo at Naples, or the Grand Opera at Paris, than any 
notion a stranger would be likely to form of the Britannia Theatre 
at Hoxton, a mile north of St. Luke's Hospital in the Old-street- 
road, London. The Forty Thieves might be played here, and every 
thief ride his real horse, and the disguised captain bring in his oil 
jars on a train of real camels, and nobody be put out of the way. 
This really extraordinary place is the achievement of one man's 
enterprise, and was erected on the ruins of an inconvenient old 
building in less than five months, at a round cost of five-and-twenty 
thousand pounds. To dismiss this part of my subject, and still to 
render to the proprietor the credit that is strictly his due, I must 
add that his sense of the responsibility upon him to make the best 
of his audience, and to do his best for them, is a highly agreeable 
sign of these times. 

As the spectators at this theatre, for a reason I will presently 
show, were the object of my journey, I entered on the play of the 
night as one of the two thousand and odd hundreds, by looking 
about me at my neighbours. We were a motley assemblage of 
people, and we had a good many boys and young men among us ; 
we had also many girls and young women. To represent, however, 
that we did not include a very great number, and a very fair pro- 
portion of family groups, would be to make a gross misstatement. 
Sucli groups were to be seen in all parts of the house ; in the boxes 
and stalls particularly, they were composed of persons of very decent 
appearance, who had many children with them. Among our dresses 
there were most kinds of shabby and greasy wear, and much fustian 
and corduroy that was neither sound nor fragrant. The caps of our 
young men were mostly of a limp character, and we who wore them, 
slouched, high-shouldered, into our places with our hands in our 
pockets, and occasionally twisted our cravats about our necks like 
eels, and occasionally tied them down our breasts like links of sau- 
sages, and occasionally had a screw in our hair over each cheek- 
bone with a slight Thief-flavour in it. Besides prowlers and idlers, 
we were mechanics, dock-labourers, costermongers, petty tradesmen, 
small clerks, milliners, stay-makers, shoe-binders, slop workers, 
poor workers in a hundred highways and byways. Many of us 
— on the whole, the majority — were not at all clean, and not at 
all choice in our lives or conversation. But we had all come to- 
gether in a place where our convenience was well consulted, and 
where we were well looked after, to enjoy an evening's entertainment 
in common. We were not going to lose any part of what we had 
paid for through anybody's caprice, and as a community we had a 
character to lose. So, we were closely attentive, and kept excellent 



28 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

order ; and let the man or boy who did otherwise instantly get out 
from this place, or we would put him out with the greatest expedi- 
tion. 

We began at half-past six with a pantomime — with a panto- 
mime so long, that before it was over I felt as if I had been travel- 
ling for six weeks — going to India, say, by the Overland Mail. 
The Spirit of Liberty was the principal personage in the Introduc- 
tion, and the Four Quarters of the World came out of the globe, 
glittering, and discoursed with the Spirit, who sang charmingly. 
We were delighted to understand that there was no liberty any- 
where but among ourselves, and we highly applauded the agreeable 
fact. In an allegorical way, which did as well as any other way, 
we and the Spirit of Liberty got into a kingdom of Needles and 
Pins, and found them at war with a potentate who called in to his 
aid their old arch enemy Rust, and who would have got the better 
of them if the Spirit of Liberty had not in the nick of time trans- 
formed the leaders into Clown, Pantaloon, Harlequin, Columbine, 
Harlequina, and a whole family of Sprites, consisting of a remark- 
ably stout father and three spineless sons. We all knew what was 
coming when the Spirit of Liberty addressed the king with a big 
face, and His Majesty backed to the side-scenes and began untying 
himself behind, with his big face all on one side. Our excitement 
at that crisis was great, and our delight unbounded. After this 
era in our existence, we went through all the incidents of a panto- 
mime ; it was not by any means a savage pantomime, in the way 
of burning or boiling people, or throwing them out of window, 
or cutting them up ; was often very droll ; was always liberally got 
up, and cleverly presented. I noticed that the people who kept 
the shops, and who represented the passengers in the thoroughfares, 
and so forth, had no conventionality in them, but were unusually 
like the real thing — from which I infer that you may take that 
audience in (if you wish to) concerning Knights and Ladies, Fairies, 
Angels, or such like, but they are not to be done as to anything in 
the streets. I noticed, also, that when two young men, dressed in 
exact imitation of the eel-and-sausage-cravated portion of the audi- 
ence, were chased by policemen, and, finding themselves in danger 
of being caught, dropped so suddenly as to oblige the policemen to 
tumble over them, there was great rejoicing among the caps — as 
though it were a delicate reference to something they had heard of 
before. 

The Pantomime was succeeded by a Melo-Drama. Throughout 
the evening I was pleased to observe Virtue quite as triumphant 
as she usually is out of doors, and indeed I thought rather more so. 
We all agreed (for the time) that honesty was the best policy, and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 29 

we were as hard as iron upon Vice, and we wouldn't hear of 
Villainy getting on in the world — no, not on any consideration 
whatever. 

Between the pieces, we almost all of us went out and refreshed. 
Many of us went the length of drinking beer at the bar of the 
neighbouring public-house, some of us drank spirits, crowds of us 
had sandwiches and ginger-beer at the refreshment-bars established 
for us in the Theatre. The sandwich — as substantial as was con- 
sistent with portability, and as cheap as possible — we hailed as 
one of our greatest institutions. It forced its way among us at all 
stages of the entertainment, and we were always delighted to see 
it ; its adaptability to the varying moods of our nature was surpris- 
ing ; we could never weep so comfortably as when our tears fell on 
our sandwich ; we could never laugh so heartily as when we choked 
with sandwich ; Virtue never looked so beautiful or Vice so de- 
formed as when we paused, sandwich in hand, to consider what 
would come of that resolution of Wickedness in boots, to sever 
Innocence in flowered chintz from Honest Industry in striped stock- 
ings. When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back upon 
sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home to bed. 

This, as I have mentioned, was Saturday night. Being Saturday 
night, I had accomplished but the half of my uncommercial journey ; 
for, its object was to compare the play on Saturday evening with 
the preaching in the same Theatre on Sunday evening. 

Therefore, at the same hour of half-past six on the similarly 
damp and muddy Sunday evening, I returned to this Theatre. I 
drove up to the entrance (fearful of being late, or I should have 
come on foot), and found myself in a large crowd of people who, I 
am happy to state, were put into excellent spirits by my arrival. 
Having nothing to look at but the mud and the closed doors, they 
looked at me, and highly enjoyed the comic spectacle. My modesty 
inducing me to draw off, some hundreds of yards, into a dark 
corner, they at once forgot me, and applied themselves to their for- 
mer occupation of looking at the mud and looking in at the closed 
doors : which, being of grated ironwork, allowed the lighted pas- 
sage within to be seen. They were chiefly people of respectable 
appearance, odd and impulsive as most crowds are, and making a 
joke of being there as most crowds do. 

In the dark corner I might have sat a long while, but that a 
veiy obliging passer-by informed me that the Theatre was already 
full, and that the people whom I saw in the street were all shut 
out for want of room. After that, I lost no time in worming my- 
self into the building, and creeping to a place in a Proscenium box 
that had been kept for me. 



30 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

There must have been full four thousand people present. Care- 
fully estimating the pit alone, I could bring it out as holding little 
less than fourteen hundred. Every part of the house was well 
filled, and I had not found it easy to make my way along the back 
of the boxes to where I sat. The chandeliers in the ceiling were 
lighted ; there was no light on the stage ; the orchestra was empty. 
The green curtain was down, and, packed pretty closely on chairs 
on the small space of stage before it, were some thirty gentlemen, 
and two or three ladies. In the centre of these, in a desk or pul- 
pit covered with red baize, was the presiding minister. The kind 
of rostrum he occupied will be very well understood, if I liken it 
to a boarded-up-fireplace turned towards the audience, with a 
gentleman in a black surtout standing in the stove and leaning 
forward over the mantelpiece. 

A portion of Scripture was being read when I went in. It was 
followed by a discourse, to which the congregation listened with most 
exemplary attention and uninterrupted silence and decorum. My 
own attention comprehended both the auditory and the speaker, 
and shall turn to both in this recalling of the scene, exactly as it 
did at the time, 

" A very difficult thing," I thought, when the discourse began, 
" to speak appropriately to so large an audience, and to speak with 
tact. Without it, better not to speak at all. Infinitely better, to 
read the New Testament well, and to let that speak. In this 
congregation there is indubitably one pulse ; but I doubt if any 
power short of genius can touch it as one, and make it answer as 
one." 

I could not possibly say to myself as the discourse proceeded, 
that the minister was a good speaker. I could not possibly say to 
myself that he expressed an understanding of the general mind and 
character of his audience. There was a supposititious working-man 
introduced into the homily, to make supposititious objections to 
our Christian religion and be reasoned down, who was not only a 
very disagreeable person, but remarkably unlike life — very much 
more unlike it than anything I had seen in the pantomime. The 
native independence of character this artisan was supposed to pos- 
sess, was represented by a suggestion of a dialect that I certainly 
never heard in my uncommercial travels, and with a coarse swing 
of voice and manner anything but agreeable to his feelings I should 
conceive, considered in the light of a portrait, and as far away from 
the fact as a Chinese Tartar. There was a model pauper intro- 
duced in like manner, who appeared to me to be the most intolera- 
bly arrogant pauper ever relieved, and to show himself in absolute 
want and dire necessity of a course of Stone Yard. For, how did 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 31 

this pauper testify to his having received the gospel of humility ? 
A gentleman met him in the workhouse, and said (which I myself 
really thought good-natured of him), "Ah, John? I am sorry to 
see you here. I am sorry to see you so poor." " Poor, sir ! " replied 
that man, drawing himself up, "I am the son of a Prince ! My 
father is the King of Kings. My father is the Lord of Lords. My 
father is the ruler of all the Princes of the Earth ! " &c. And this 
was what all the preacher's fellow-sinners might come to, if they 
would embrace this blessed book — which I must say it did some 
violence to my own feelings of reverence, to see held out at arm's 
length at frequent intervals and soundingly slapped, like a slow lot 
at a sale. Now, could I help asking myself the question, whether 
the mechanic before me, who must detect the preacher as being 
wrong about the visible manner of himself and the like of himself, 
and about such a noisy lip-server as that pauper, might not, most 
unhappily for the usefulness of the occasion, doubt that preacher's 
being right about things not visible to human senses % 

Again. Is it necessary or advisable to address such an audience 
continually as "fellow-sinners"? Is it not enough to be fellow- 
creatures, born yesterday, suffering and striving to-day, dying to- 
morrow ? By our common humanity, my brothers and sisters, by 
our common capacities for pain and pleasure, by our common laugh- 
ter and our common tears, by our common aspiration to reach some- 
thing better than ourselves, by our common tendency to believe in 
something good, and to invest whatever we love or whatever we 
lose with some qualities that are superior to our own failings and 
weaknesses as we know them in our own poor hearts — by these. 
Hear me ! — Surely, it is enough to be fellow-creatures. Surely, 
it includes the other designation, and some touching meanings over 
and above. 

Again. There was a personage introduced into the discourse 
(not an absolute novelty, to the best of my remembrance of my 
reading), who had been personally known to the preacher, and 
had been quite a Crichton in all the ways of philosophy, but had 
been an infidel. Many a time had the preacher talked with him 
on that subject, and many a time had he failed to convince that 
intelligent man. But he fell ill, and died, and before he died he 
recorded his conversion — in words which the preacher had taken 
down, my fellow-sinners, and would read to you from this piece of 
paper. I must confess that to me, as one of an uninstructed audi- 
ence, they did not appear particularly edifying. I thought their 
tone extremely selfish, and I thought they had a spiritual vanity 
in them which was of the before-mentioned refractory pauper's 



32 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

All slangs and twangs are objectionable everywhere, but the 
slang and twang of the conventicle — as bad in its way as that of 
the House of Commons, and nothing worse can be said of it — 
should be studiously avoided under such circumstances as I de- 
scribe. The avoidance was not complete on this occasion. Nor 
was it quite agreeable to see the preacher addressing his pet " points " 
to his backers on the stage, as if appealing to those disciples to 
show him up, and testify to the multitude that each of those points 
was a clincher. 

But, in respect of the large Christianity of his general tone; 
of his renunciation of all priestly authority ; of his earnest and 
reiterated assurance to the people that the commonest among them 
could work out their own salvation if they would, by simply, lovingly, 
and dutifully following Our Saviour, and that they needed the 
mediation of no erring man ; in these particulars, this gentleman 
deserved all praise. Nothing could be better than the spirit, or 
the plain emphatic words of his discourse in these respects. And 
it was a most significant and encouraging circumstance that when- 
ever he struck that chord, or whenever he described anything which 
Christ himself had done, the array of faces before him was very 
much more earnest, and very much more expressive of emotion, than 
at any other time. 

And now, I am brought to the fact, that the lowest part of the 
audience of the previous night, was not there. There is no doubt 
about it. There was no such thing in that building, that Sunday 
evening. I have been told since, that the lowest part of the audi- 
ence of the Victoria Theatre has been attracted to its Sunday ser- 
vices. I have been very glad to hear it, but on this occasion of 
which I write, the lowest part of the usual audience of the Britannia 
Theatre, decidedly and unquestionably stayed away. When I first 
took my seat and looked at the house, my surprise at the change 
in its occupants was as great as my disappointment. To the most 
respectable class of the previous evening, was added a great number 
of respectable strangers attracted by curiosity, and drafts from the 
regular congregations of various chapels. It was impossible to fail 
in identifying the character of these last, and they were very numer- 
ous. I came out in a strong, slow tide of them setting from the boxes. 
Indeed, Avhile the discourse was in progress, the respectable char- 
acter of the auditory was so manifest in their appearance, that when 
the minister addressed a supposititious "outcast," one really felt a 
little impatient of it, as a figure of speech not justified by anything 
the eye could discover. 

The time appointed for the conclusion of the proceedings was 
eight o'clock. The address having lasted until full that time, and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 33 

it being the custom to conclude with a hymn, the preacher inti- 
mated in a few sensible words that the clock had struck the hour, 
and that those who desired to go before the hymn was sung, could 
go now, without giving offence. No one stirred. The hymn was 
then sung, in good time and tune and unison, and its effect was 
very striking. A comprehensive benevolent prayer dismissed the 
throng, and in seven or eight minutes there was nothing left in 
the Theatre but a light cloud of dust. 

That these Sunday meetings in Theatres are good things, I do 
not doubt. Nor do I doubt that they will work lower and lower 
down in the social scale, if those who preside over them will be 
very careful on two heads : firstly, not to disparage the places in 
which they speak, or the intelligence of their hearers; secondly, 
not to set themselves in antagonism to the natural inborn desire of 
the mass of mankind to recreate themselves and to be amused. 

There is a third head, taking precedence of all others, to which 
my remarks on the discourse I heard, have tended. In the New 
Testament there is the most beautiful and afiecting history con- 
ceivable by man, and there are the terse models for all prayer and 
for all preaching. As to the models, imitate them, Sunday preach- 
ers — else why are they there, consider ? As to the history, tell it. 
Some people cannot read, some people will not read, many people 
(this especially holds among the young and ignorant) find it hard 
to pursue the verse-form in which the book is presented to them, 
and imagine that those breaks imply gaps and want of continuity. 
Help them over that first stumbling-block, by setting forth the 
history in narrative, with no fear of exhausting it. You will 
never preach so well, you will never move them so profoundly, you 
will never send them away with half so much to think of. Which 
is the better interest : Christ's choice of twelve poor men to help 
in those merciful wonders among the poor and rejected; or the 
pious bullying of a whole Union-full of paupers 1 What is your 
changed philosopher to wretched me, peeping in at the door out of 
the mud of the streets and of my life, when you have the widow's 
son to tell me about, the ruler's daughter, the other figure at the 
door when the brother of the two sisters was dead, and one of the 
two ran to the mourner, crying, " The Master is come and calleth 
for thee " ? — - Let the preacher who will thoroughly forget himself 
and remember no individuality but one, and no eloquence but one, 
stand up before four thousand men and women at the Britannia 
Theatre any Sunday night, recounting that narrative to them as 
fellow-creatures, and he shall see a sight ! 



34 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 2, No. 4G, March 10, 1860. 
V. 

POOR MEECANTILE JACK. 

Is the sweet little cherub who sits smiling aloft and keeps watch 
on the life of poor Jack, commissioned to take charge of Mercan- 
tile Jack, as well as Jack of the national navy ? If not, who is ? 
What is the cherub about, and what are we all about, when poor 
Mercantile Jack is having his brains slowly knocked out by penny- 
weights, aboard the brig Beelzebub, or the barque Bowie-knife — 
when he looks his last at that infernal craft, with the first officer's 
iron boot-heel in his remaining eye, or with his dying body towed 
overboard in the ship's wake, while the cruel wounds in it do " the 
multitudinous seas incarnadine " ? 

Is it unreasonable to entertain a belief that if, aboard the brig 
Beelzebub or the barque Bowie-knife, the first officer did half the 
damage to cotton that he does to men, there would presently arise 
from both sides of the Atlantic so vociferous an invocation of the 
sweet little cherub who sits calculating aloft, keeping watch on the 
markets that pay, that such vigilant cherub would, with a winged 
sword, have that gallant officer's organ of destructiveness out of 
his head in the space of a flash of lightning ? 

If it be unreasonable, then am I the most unreasonable of men, 
for I believe it with all my soul. 

This was my thought as I walked the dock-quays at Liverpool, 
keeping watch on poor Mercantile Jack. Alas for me ! I have 
long outgrown the state of sweet little cherub ; but there I was, 
and there Mercantile Jack was, and very busy he was, and very 
cold he was : the snow yet lying in the frozen furrows of the land, 
and the north-east winds snipping off the tops of the little waves 
in the Mersey, and rolling them into hailstones to pelt him with. 
Mercantile Jack was hard at it, in the hard weather : as he mostly 
is in all weathers, poor Jack. He was girded to ships' masts and 
funnels of steamers, like a forester to a great oak, scraping and 
painting ; he was lying out on yards, furling sails that tried to 
beat him off; he was dimly discernible up in a world of giant 
cobwebs, reefing and splicing; he was faintly audible down in 
holds, stowing and unshipping cargo ; he was winding round and 
round at capstans melodious, monotonous, and drunk ; he was of 
a diabolical aspect, with coaling for the Antipodes ; he was wash- 
ing decks barefoot, with the breast of his red shirt open to the 
blast, though it was sharper than the knife in his leathern girdle ; 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 35 

he was looking over bulwarks, all eyes and hair ; he was standing 
by at the shoot of the Cunard steamer, off to-morrow, as the stocks 
in trade of several butchers, poulterers, and fishmongers, poured 
down into the ice-house ; he was coming aboard of other vessels, 
with his kit in a tarpaulin bag, attended by plunderers to the very 
last moment of his shore-going existence. As though his senses 
when released from the uproar of the elements, were under obliga- 
tion to be confused by other turmoil, there was a rattling of wheels, 
a clattering of hoofs, a clashing of iron, a jolting of cotton and 
hides and casks and timber, an incessant deafening disturbance on 
the quays, that was the very madness of sound. And as, in the 
midst of it, he stood swaying about, with his hair blown all man- 
ner of wild ways, rather crazedly taking leave of his plunderers, 
all the rigging in the docks was shrill in the wind, and every little 
steamer coming and going across the Mersey was sharp in its blow- 
ing off, and every buoy in the river bobbed spitefully up and down, 
as if there were a general taunting chorus of " Come along, Mer- 
cantile Jack ! Ill-lodged, ill-fed, ill-used, hocussed, entrapped, an- 
ticipated, cleaned out. Come along. Poor Mercantile Jack, and be 
tempest-tossed till you are drowned ! " 

The uncommercial transaction which had brought me and Jack to- 
gether, was this : — I had entered the Liverpool police-force, that 
I might have a look at the various unlawful traps which are every 
night set for Jack. As my term of service in that distinguished 
corps was short, and as my personal bias in the capacity of one of 
its members has ceased, no suspicion will attach to my evidence 
that it is an admirable force. Besides that it is composed, without 
favour, of the best men that can be picked, it is directed by an 
unusual intelligence. Its organisation against Fires, I take to be 
much better than the metropolitan system, and in all respects it 
tempers its remarkable vigilance with a still more remarkable dis- 
cretion. 

Jack had knocked off work in the docks some hours, and I had 
taken, for purposes of identification, a photograph-likeness of a 
thief, in the portrait-room at our head police office (on the whole, 
he seemed rather complimented by the proceeding), and I had been 
on police parade, and the small hand of the clock was moving on 
to ten, when I took up my lantern to follow Mr. Superintendent 
to the traps that were set for Jack. In Mr. Superintendent I 
saw, as anybody might, a tall well-looking well set-up man of a 
soldierly bearing, with a cavalry air, a good chest, and a resolute 
but not by any means ungentle face. He carried in his hand a 
plain black walking-stick of hard wood ; and whenever and where- 
ever, at any after-time of the night, he struck it on the pavement 



36 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

with a ringing sound, it instantly produced a whistle out of the 
darkness, and a policeman. To this remarkable stick, I refer an 
air of mystery and magic which pervaded the whole of my perquisi- 
tion among the traps that were set for Jack. 

We began by diving into the obscurest streets and lanes of the port. 
Suddenly pausing in a flow of cheerful discourse, before a dead wall, 
apparently some ten miles long, Mr. Superintendent stmck upon 
the ground, and the wall opened and shot out, with military salute 
of hand to temple, two policemen — not in the least surprised 
themselves, not in the least surprising Mr. Superintendent. 

" All right, Sharpeye ? " 

" All right, sir." 

"All right, Trampfoot?" 

" All right, sir." 

" Is Quickear there 1 " 

"Here am I, sir." 

" Come with us." 

" Yes, sir." 

So Sharpeye went before, and Mr. Superintendent and I went 
next, and Trampfoot and Quickear marched as rear-guard. Sharp- 
eye, I soon had occasion to remark, had a skilful and quite pro- 
fessional way of opening doors — touched latches delicately, as if 
they were keys of musical instruments — opened every door he 
touched, as if he were perfectly confident that there was stolen 
property behind it — instantly insinuated himself, to prevent its 
being shut. 

Sharpeye opened several doors of traps that were set for Jack, 
but Jack did not happen to be in any of them. They were all 
such miserable places that really, Jack, if I were you, I would give 
them a wider berth. In every trap, somebody was sitting over a 
fire, waiting for Jack. Now, it was a crouching old woman, like 
the picture of the Norwood Gipsy in the old sixpenny dream- 
books ; now, it was a crimp of the male sex, in a checked shirt and 
without a coat, reading a newspaper ; now, it was a man crimp 
and a woman crimp, who always introduced themselves as united 
in holy matrimony; now, it was Jack's delight, his (un)lovely 
Nan ; but they were all waiting for Jack, and were all frightfully 
disappointed to see us. 

" Who have you got up-stairs here ? " says Sharpeye, generally. 
(In the Move-on tone.) 

" Nobody, surr ; sure not a blessed sowl ! " (Irish feminine 
reply.) 

"What do you mean by nobody? Didn't I hear a woman's step 
go up-stairs when my hand was on the latch 1 " 



THE UNCOMMEKCIAL TRAVELLER. 37 

" Ah ! sure thin you're right, surr, I forgot her ! 'Tis on'y 
Betsy White, surr. Ah ! you know Betsy, surr. Come down, 
Betsy darUn', and say the gintlemin." 

Generally, Betsy looks over the banisters (the steep staircase 
is in the room) with a forcible expression in her protesting face, 
of an intention to compensate herself for the present trial by grind- 
ing Jack finer than usual when he does come. Generally, Sharp- 
eye turns to Mr. Superintendent, and says, as if the subjects of 
his remarks were wax-work : 

" One of the worst, sir, this house is. This woman has been 
indicted three times. This man's a regular bad one likewise. 
His real name is Pegg. Gives himself out as Waterhouse." 

" Never had sitch a name as Pegg near me back, thin, since I 
was in this house, bee the good Lard ! " says the woman. 

Generally, the man says nothing at all, but becomes exceedingly 
round-shouldered, and pretends to read his paper with rapt atten- 
tion. Generally, Sharpeye directs our observation with a look, to 
the prints and pictures that are invariably numerous on the walls. 
Always, Trampfoot and Quickear are taking notice on the doorstep. 
In default of Sharpeye being acquainted with the exact individu- 
ality of any gentleman encountered, one of these two is sure to 
proclaim from the outer air, like a gruff spectre, that Jackson is 
not Jackson, but knows himself to be Fogle ; or that Canlon is 
Walker's brother, against whom there was not sufficient evidence ; 
or that the man who says he never was at sea since he was a boy, 
came ashore from a voyage last Thursday, or sails to-morrow morn- 
ing. " And that is a bad class of man, you see," says Mr. Super- 
intendent, when he got out into the dark again, " and very difficult 
to deal with, who, when he has made this place too hot to hold 
him, enters himself for a voyage as steward or cook, and is out 
of knowledge for months, and then turns up again worse than 
ever." 

When we had gone into many such houses, and had come out (al- 
ways leaving everybody relapsing into waiting for Jack), we started 
off to a singing-house where Jack was expected to muster strong. 

The vocalisation was taking place in a long low room up-stairs ; 
at one end, an orchestra of two performers, and a small platform ; 
across the room, a series of open pews for Jack, with an aisle down 
the middle ; at the other end a larger pew than the rest, entitled 
Snug, and reserved for mates and similar good company. About 
the room, some amazing coffee-coloured pictures varnished an inch 
deep, and some stuffed creatures in cases ; dotted among the audi- 
ence, in Snug and out of Snug, the "Professionals;" among them, 
the celebrated comic favourite Mr. Banjo Bones, looking very hide- 



38 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

ous with his blackened face and hmp sugar-loaf hat ; beside him, 
sipping rum-and- water, Mrs. Banjo Bones, in her natural colours — 
a little heightened. 

It was a Friday night, and Friday night was considered not a 
good night for Jack. At any rate, Jack did not show in very great 
force even here, though the house was one to which he much re- 
sorts, and where a good deal of money is taken. There was British 
Jack, a little maudlin and sleepy, lolling over his empty glass, as 
if he were trying to read his fortune at the bottom ; there was 
Loafing Jack of the Stars and Stripes, rather an unpromising cus- 
tomer, with his long nose, lank cheek, high cheek-bones, and noth- 
ing soft about him but his cabbage-leaf hat ; there was Spanish 
Jack, with curls of black hair, rings in his ears, and a knife not 
far from his hand, if you got into trouble with him ; there were 
Maltese Jack, and Jack of Sweden, and Jack the Finn, looming 
through the smoke of their pipes, and turning faces that looked 
as if they were carved out of dark wood, towards the young lady 
dancing the hornpipe : who found the platform so exceedingly small 
for it, that I had a nervous expectation of seeing her, in the back- 
ward steps, disappear through the window. Still, if all hands had 
been got together, they would not have more than half-filled the 
room. Observe, however, said Mr. Licensed Victualler, the host, 
that it was Friday night, and, besides, it was getting on for twelve, 
and Jack had gone aboard. A sharp and watchful man, Mr. 
Licensed Victualler, the host, with tight lips and a complete edi- 
tion of Cocker's arithmetic in each eye. Attended to his business 
himself, he said. Always on the spot. When he heard of talent, 
trusted nobody's account of it, but went off by rail to see it. If 
true talent, engaged it. Pounds a week for talent — four pound 
— fi.ve pound. Banjo Bones was undoubted talent. Hear this 
instrument that was going to play — it was real talent ! In truth 
it was very good ; a kind of piano-accordion, played by a young 
girl of a delicate prettiness of face, figure, and dress, that made the 
audience look coarser. She sang to the instrument, too ; first, a 
song about village bells, and how they chimed ; then a song about 
how I went to sea ; winding up with an imitation of the bagpipes, 
which Mercantile Jack seemed to understand much tlie best. A 
good girl, said Mr. Licensed Victualler. Kept herself select. 
Sat in Snug, not listening to the blandishments of Mates. Lived 
with mother. Father dead. Once a merchant well to do, but 
over-speculated himself. On delicate inquiry as to salary paid for 
item of talent under consideration, Mr. Victualler's pounds dropped 
suddenly to shillings — still it was a very comfortable thing for a 
young person like that, you know ; she only went on six times a 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 39 

night, and was only required to be there from six at night to 
twelve. What was more conclusive was, Mr. Victualler's assurance 
that he " never allowed any language, and never suffered any dis- 
turbance." Sharpeye confirmed the statement, and the order that pre- 
vailed was the best proof of it that could have been cited. So, 
I came to the conclusion that poor Mercantile Jack might do 
(as I am afraid he does) much worse than trust himself to Mr. 
Victualler, and pass his evenings here. 

But we had not yet looked, Mr. Superintendent — said Tramp- 
foot, receiving us in the street again with military salute — for 
Dark Jack. True, Trampfoot. Ring the wonderful stick, rub 
the wonderful lantern, and cause the spirits of the stick and lan- 
tern to convey us to the Darkies. 

There was no disappointment in the matter of Dark Jack ; he 
was producible. The Genii set us down in the little first floor of 
a little public-house, and there, in a stiflingly close atmosphere, were 
Dark Jack, and Dark Jack's delight, his ivhite unlovely Nan, sit- 
ting against the wall all round the room. ]\Iore than that : Dark 
Jack's delight was the least unlovely Nan, both morally and physi- 
cally, that I saw that night. 

As a fiddle and tambourine band were sitting among the com- 
pany, Quickear suggested why not strike up"? "Ah, la'ads ! " said 
a negro sitting by the door, "gib the jebblem a darnse. Tak' yah 
pardlers, jebblem, for 'um QUAD-rill." 

This was the landlord, in a G-reek cap, and a dress half Greek 
and half English. As master of the ceremonies, he called all the 
figures, and occasionally addressed himself parenthetically — after 
this manner. When he was very loud, I use capitals. 

" Now den ! Hoy ! One. Right and left. (Put a steam on, 
gib 'um powder.) LA-dies' chail. Bal-Ioou say. Lemonade ! 
Two. AB-warnse and go back (gib 'ell a breakdown, shake it out 
o' yerselbs, keep a movil). SwiNG-corners, Bal-Ioou say, and 
Lemonade ! (Hoy !) Three. Gent come for'ard with a lady 
and go back, hoppersite come for'ard and do what yer can. (Aeio- 
hoy !) Bal-Ioou say, and leetle lemonade (Dat hair nigger by 'um 
fireplace 'hind a' time, shake it out o' yerselbs, gib 'ell a break- 
down). Now den ! Hoy ! Four ! Lemonade. Bal-Ioou say, and 
swing. Four ladies meets in 'um middle, four gents goes round 
'um ladies, four gents passes out under 'um ladies' arms, swing — 
and Lemonade till 'a moosic can't play no more ! (Hoy, Hoy ! )" 

The male dancers were all blacks, and one was an unusually 
powerful man of six feet three or four. The sound of their flat 
feet on the floor was as unlike the sound of white feet as their 
faces were unlike white faces. They toed and heeled, shuffled, 



40 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

double-shuffled, double-double-shuffled, covered the buckle, and beat 
the time out, rarely, dancing with a great show of teeth, and 
with a childish good-humoured enjoyment that was very prepossess- 
ing. They generally kept together, these poor fellows, said Mr. 
Superintendent, because they were at a disadvantage singly, and 
liable to slights in the neighbouring streets. But, if I were Light 
Jack, I should be very slow to interfere oppressively with Dark 
Jack, for, whenever I have had to do with him I have found him 
a simple and a gentle fellow. Bearing this in mind, I asked his 
friendly permission to leave him restoration of beer, in wishing him 
good night, and thus it fell out that the last words I heard him 
say as I blundered down the worn stairs, were, " Jebblem's elth ! 
Ladies drinks fust ! " 

The night was now well on into the morning, but, for miles and 
hours we explored a strange world, where nobody ever goes to 
bed, but everybody is eternally sitting up, waiting for Jack. This 
exploration was among a labyrinth of dismal courts and blind alleys, 
called Entries, kept in wonderful order by the police, and in much 
better order than by the corporation : the want of gaslight in the 
most dangerous and infamous of these places being quite unworthy 
of so spirited a town. I need describe but two or three of the 
houses in which Jack was waited for as specimens of the' rest. 
Many we attained by noisome passages so profoundly dark that 
we felt our way with our hands. Not one of the whole number 
we visited, was without its show of prints and ornamented crock- 
ery ; the quantity of the latter set forth on little shelves and in 
little cases, in otherwise wretched rooms, indicating that Mercantile 
Jack must have an extraordinary fondness for crockery, to necessi- 
tate so much of that bait in his traps. 

Among such garniture, in one front parlour in the dead of the 
night, four women were sitting by a fire. One of them had a 
male child in her arms. On a stool among them was a swarthy 
youth with a guitar, who had evidently stopped playing when our 
footsteps were heard. 

" Well ! how do you do ? " says Mr. Superintendent, looking 
about him. 

" Pretty well, sir, and hope you gentlemen are going to treat us 
ladies, now you have come to see us." 

" Order there ! " says Sharpeye. 

" None of that ! " says Quickear. 

Trampfoot, outside, is heard to confide to himself, "Meggis- 
son's lot this is. And a bad 'un ! " 

" Well ! " says Mr. Superintendent, laying his hand on the shoul- 
der of the swarthy youth, " and who's this % " 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 41 

" Antonio, sir." 

" And what does he do here ? " 

" Come to give us a bit of music. No harm in that, I suppose? " 

" A young foreign sailor ? " 

" Yes. He's a Spaniard. You're a Spaniard, ain't you, Antonio 1 " 

"Me Spanish." 

"And he don't know a word you say, not he; not if you was 
to talk to him till doomsday." (Triumphantly, as if it redounded to 
the credit of the house.) 

" Will he play something 1 " 

" Oh, yes, if you like. Play something, Antonio. You ain't 
ashamed to play something ; are you 1 " 

The cracked guitar raises the feeblest ghost of a tune, and three 
of the women keep time to it with their heads, and the fourth with 
the child. If Antonio has brought any money in with him, I am 
afraid he will never take it out, and it even strikes me that his 
jacket and guitar may be in a bad way. But, the look of the young 
man and the tinkling of the instrument so change the place in a 
moment to a leaf out of Don Quixote, that I wonder where his 
mule is stabled, until he leaves off. 

I am bound to acknowledge (as it tends rather to my uncommer- 
cial confusion), that I occasioned a difl&culty in this establishment, 
by having taken the child in my arms. For, on my offering to 
restore it to a ferocious joker not unstimulated by rum, who 
claimed to be its mother, that unnatural parent put her hands 
behind her, and declined to accept it ; backing into the fireplace, 
and very shrilly declaring, regardless of remonstrance from her 
friends, that she knowed it to be Law, that whoever took a child 
from its mother of his own will, was bound to stick to it. The 
uncommercial sense of being in a rather ridiculous position with the 
poor little child beginning to be frightened, was relieved by my 
worthy friend and fellow-constable, Trampfoot ; who, laying hands 
on the article as if it were a Bottle, passed it on to the nearest 
woman, and bade her " take hold of that." As we came out the 
Bottle was passed to the ferocious joker, and they all sat down as 
before, including Antonio and the guitar. It was clear that there 
was no such thing as a nightcap to this baby's head, and that even 
he never went to bed, but was always kept up — and would grow 
up, kept up — waiting for Jack. 

Later still in the night, we came (by the court " where the man 
was murdered," and by the other court across the street, into 
which his body was dragged) to another parlour in another Entry, 
where several people were sitting round a fire in just the same way. 
It was a dirty and offensive place, with some ragged clothes drying 



42 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

in it ; but there was a high shelf over the entrance-door (to be out 
of the reach of marauding hands, possibly) with two large white 
loaves on it, and a great piece of Cheshire . cheese. 

" Well ! " says Mr. Superintendent, with a comprehensive look 
all round. " How do you do % " 

" Not much to boast of, sir." From the curtseying woman of 
the house. " This is my good man, sir." 

" You are not registered as a common Lodging House ? " 

" No, sir." 

Sharpeye (in the Move-on tone) puts in the pertinent inquiry, 
" Then why ain't you ? " 

" Ain't got no one here, Mr. Sharpeye," rejoins the woman and 
my good man together, " but our own family." 

" How many are you in family % " 

The woman takes time to count, under pretence of coughing, 
and adds, as one scant of breath, '' Seven, sir." 

But she has missed one, so Sharpeye, who knows all about it, says : 

"Here's a young man here makes eight, who ain't of your 
family % " 

" No, Mr. Sharpeye, he's a weekly lodger." 

" What does he do for a living ? " 

The young man here, takes the reply upon himself, and shortly 
answers, " Ain't got nothing to do." 

The young man here, is modestly brooding behind a damp apron 
pendent from a clothes-line. As I glance at him I become — but 
I don't know why — vaguely reminded of Woolwich, Chatham, 
Portsmouth, and Dover. When we get out, my respected fellow- 
constable Sharpeye addressing Mr. Superintendent, says : 

"You noticed that young man, sir, in at Darby's?" 

"Yes. .What is he?" 

" Deserter, sir." 

Mr. Sharpeye further intimates that when we have done with 
his services, he will step back and take that young man. Which 
in course of time he does : feeling at perfect ease about finding 
him, and knowing for a moral certainty that nobody in that region 
will be gone to bed. 

Later still in the night, we came to another parlour up a step 
or two from the street, which was very cleanly, neatly, even taste- 
fully, kept, and in which, set forth on a draped chest of drawers 
masking the staircase, was such a profusion of ornamental crockery, 
that it would have furnished forth a handsome sale-booth at a fair. 
It backed up a stout old lady — Hogarth drew her exact likeness 
more than once — and a boy who was carefully writing a copy in 
a copy-book. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 43 

" Well, ma'am, how do you do ? " 

Sweetly, she can assure the dear gentlemen, sweetly. Charm- 
ingly, charmingly. And overjoyed to see us ! 

" Why, this is a strange time for this boy to be writing his copy. 
In the middle of the night ! " 

" So it is, dear gentlemen, Heaven bless your welcome faces and 
send ye prosperous, but he has been to the Play with a young 
friend for his diversion, and he combinates his improvement with 
entertainment, by doing his school-writing afterwards, God be good 
to ye ! " 

The copy admonished human nature to subjugate the fire of 
every fierce desire. One might have thought it recommended stir- 
ring the fire, the old lady so approved it. There she sat, rosily 
beaming at the copy-book and the boy, and invoking showers of 
blessings on our heads, when we left her in the middle of the night, 
waiting for Jack, 

Later still in the night, we came to a nauseous room with an 
earth floor, into which the refuse scum of an alley trickled. The 
stench of this habitation was abominable ; the seeming poverty of 
it, diseased and dire. Yet, here again, was visitor or lodger — a 
man sitting before the fire, like the rest of them elsewhere, and 
apparently not distasteful to the mistress's niece, who was also 
before the fire. The mistress herself had the misfortune of being 
in jail. 

Three weird old women of transcendent ghastliness, were at 
needlework at a table in this room. Says Trampfoot to First Witch, 
" What are you making ? " Says she, "Money-bags." 

" What are you making?" retorts Trampfoot, a little off his 



"Bags to hold your money," says the witch, shaking her head, 
and setting her teeth ; " you as has got it." 

She holds up a common cash-bag, and on the table is a heap of 
such bags. Witch Two laughs at us. Witch Three scowls at us. 
Witch sisterhood all, stitch, stitch. First Witch has a red circle 
round each eye. I fancy it like the beginning of the development 
of a perverted diabolical halo, and that when it spreads all round 
her head, she will die in the odour of devilry. 

Trampfoot wishes to be informed what First Witch has got 
behind the table, down by the side of her, there ? Witches Two 
and Three croak angrily, " Show him the child ! " 

She drags out a skinny little arm from a brown dustheap on the 
ground. Adjured not to disturb the child, she lets it drop again. 
Thus we find at last that there is one child in the world of Entries 
who goes to bed — if this be bed. 



44 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Mr. Superintendent asks how long are they going to work at 
those bags 1 

How long 1 First Witch repeats. Going to have supper pres- 
ently. See the cups and saucers, and the plates. 

" Late ? Ay ! But we has to 'arn our supper afore we eats 
it ! " Both the other witches repeat this after First Witch, and 
take the Uncommercial measurement with their eyes, as for a 
charmed winding-sheet. Some grim discourse ensues, referring to 
the mistress of the cave, who will be released from jail to-morrow. 
Witches pronounce Trampfoot "right there," when he deems it a 
trying distance for the old lady to walk ; she shall be fetched by 
niece in a spring-cart. 

As I took a parting look at First Witch in turning away, the 
red marks round her eyes seemed to have already grown larger, 
and she hungrily and thirstily looked out beyond me into the dark 
doorway, to see if Jack were there. For, Jack came even here, 
and the mistress had got into jail through deluding Jack. 

When I at last ended this night of travel and got to bed, I 
failed to keep my mind on comfortable thoughts of Seamen's Homes 
(not overdone with strictness), and improved dock regulations giv- 
ing Jack greater benefit of fire and candle aboard ship, through 
my mind's wandering among the vermin I had seen. Afterwards 
the same vermin ran all over my sleep. Evermore, when on a 
breezy day I see Poor Mercantile Jack running into port with a fair 
wind under all sail, I shall think of the unsleeping host of devourers 
who never go to bed, and are always in their set traps waiting for 
him. 



All the Year Bound, Vol. 2, No. 48, March 24, 1860. 
VI. 

REFRESHMENTS FOR TRAVELLERS. 

In the late high winds I was blown to a great many places — 
and indeed, wind or no wind, I generally have extensive transactions 
on hand in the article of Air — but I have not been blown to any Eng- 
lish place lately, and I very seldom have blown to any English place 
in my life, where I could get anything good to eat and drink in five 
minutes, or where, if I sought it, I was received with a welcome. 

This is a curious thing to consider. But before (stimulated by 
my own experiences and the representations of many fellow-travellers 
of every uncommercial and commercial degree) I consider it further, 
I must utter a passing word of wonder concerning high winds. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 45 

I wonder why metropolitan gales always blow so hard at Wal- 
worth. I cannot imagine what Walworth has done, to bring such 
windy punishment upon itself, as I never fail to find recorded in 
the newspapers when the wind has blown at all hard. Brixton seems 
to have something on its conscience ; Peckham suffers more than a 
virtuous Peckham might be supposed to deserve ; the howling neigh- 
bourhood of Deptford figures largely in the accounts of the ingen- 
ious gentlemen who are out in every wind that blows, and to whom 
it is an ill high wind that blows no good ; but, there can hardly be 
any Walworth left by this time. It must surely be blown away. 
I have read of more chimney-stacks and house-copings coming down 
with terrific smashes at Walworth, and of more sacred edifices being 
nearly (not quite) blown out to sea from the same accursed locality, 
than I have read of practised thieves with the appearance and man- 
ners of gentlemen — a popular phenomenon which never existed on 
earth out of fiction and a police report. Again : I wonder why 
people are always blown into the Surrey Canal, and into no other 
piece of water ! Why do people get up early and go out in groups, 
to be blown into the Surrey Canal ? Do they say to one another, 
"Welcome death, so that we get into the newspapers?" Even 
that would be an insufficient explanation, because even then they 
might sometimes put themselves in the way of being blown into 
the Eegent's Canal, instead of always saddling Surrey for the field. 
Some nameless policeman, too, is constantly, on the slightest prov- 
ocation, getting himself blown into this same Surrey Canal. Will 
Sir Richard Mayne see to it, and restrain that weak-minded and 
feeble-bodied constable ? 

To resume the consideration of the curious question of Refresh- 
ment. I am a Briton, and, as such, I am aware that I never will 
be a slave — and yet I have latent suspicion that there must be 
some slavery of wrong custom in this matter. 

I travel by railroad, I start from home at seven or eight in the 
morning, after breakfasting hurriedly. What with skimming over 
the open landscape, what with mining in the damp bowels of the 
earth, what with banging booming and shrieking the scores of miles 
away, I am hungry when I arrive at the " Refreshment " station 
where I am expected. Please to observe, expected. I have said, 
I am hungry ; perhaps I might say, with greater point and force, 
that I am to some extent exhausted, and that I need — in the 
expressive French sense of the word — to be restored. What is 
provided for my restoration ? The apartment that is to restore me 
is a wind-trap, cunningly set to inveigle all the draughts in that 
country-side, and to communicate a special intensity and velocity to 
them as they rotate in two hurricanes : one, about my wretched head : 



46 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

one, about my wretched legs. The traming of the young ladies 
behind the counter who are to restore me, has been from their in- 
fancy directed to the assumption of a defiant dramatic show that I 
am not expected. It is in vain for me to rejDresent to them by my 
humble and conciliatory manners, that I wish to be liberal. It is 
in vain for me to represent to myself, for the encouragement of my 
sinking soul, that the young ladies have a pecuniary interest in my 
arrival. Neither my reason nor my feelings can make head against 
the cold glazed glare of eye with which I am assured that I am not 
expected, and not wanted. The solitary man among the bottles 
would sometimes take pity on me, if he dared, but he is powerless 
against the rights and mights of Woman. (Of the page I make no 
account, for, he is a boy, and therefore the natural enemy of Crea- 
tion.) Chilling fast, in the deadly tornadoes to which my upper 
and lower extremities are exposed, and subdued by the moral dis- 
advantage at which I -stand, I turn my disconsolate eyes on the 
refreshments that are to restore me. I find that I must either 
scald my throat by insanely ladling into it, against time and for 
no wager, brown hot water stiffened with flour; or, I must make 
myself flaky and sick with Banbury cake ; or, I must stuff into 
my delicate organisation, a currant pincushion which I know will 
swell into immeasurable dimensions when it has got there ; or, I 
must extort from an iron-bound quarry, with a fork, as if I were 
farming an inhospitable soil, some glutinous lumps of gristle and 
grease, called pork-pie. While thus forlornly occupied, I find that 
the depressing banquet on the table is, in every phase of its pro- 
foundly unsatisfactory character, so like the banquet at the meanest 
and shabbiest of evening parties, that I begin to think I must have 
" brought down " to supper, the old lady unknown, blue with cold, 
who is setting her teeth on edge with a cool orange at my elbow — 
that the pastrycook who has compounded for the company on the 
lowest terms per head, is a fraudulent bankrupt, redeeming his con- 
tract with the stale stock from his window — that, for some un- 
explained reason, the family giving the party have become my 
mortal foes, and have given it on purpose to affront me. Or, I 
fancy that I am " breaking up " again, at the evening conversazione 
at school, charged two-and-sixpence in the half-year's bill ; or break- 
ing down again at that celebrated evening party given at Mrs. 
Bogles's boarding-house when I was a boarder there, on which occa- 
sion Mrs. Bogles was taken in execution by a branch of the legal 
profession who got in as the harp, and was removed (with the keys 
and subscribed capital) to a place of durance, half an hour prior to 
the commencement of the festivities. 
Take another case. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 47 

Mr. Grazinglands, of the Midland Counties, came to London by- 
railroad one morning last week, accompanied by the amiable and 
fascinating Mrs. Grazinglands. Mr. G. is a gentleman of a com- 
fortable property, and had a little business to transact at the Bank 
of England, which required the concurrence and signature of Mrs. 
G. Their business disposed of, Mr. and Mrs. Grazinglands viewed 
the Royal Exchange, and the exterior of St. Paul's Cathedral. The 
spirits of Mrs. Grazinglands then gradually beginning to flag, Mr. 
Grazinglands (who is the tenderest of husbands) remarked with 
sympathy, "Arabella, my dear, I fear you are faint." Mrs. Graz- 
inglands replied, "Alexander, I am rather faint; but don't mind 
me, I shall be better presently." Touched by the feminine meek- 
ness of this answer, Mr. Grazinglands looked in at a pastrycook's 
window, hesitating as to the expediency of lunching at that estab- 
lishment. He beheld nothing to eat, but butter in various forms, 
slightly charged with jam, and languidly frizzling over tepid 
water. Two ancient turtle-shells, on which was inscribed the 
legend, "Soups," decorated a glass partition within, enclosing a 
stuffy alcove, from which a ghastly mockery of a marriage-break- 
fast spread on a rickety table, warned the terrified traveller. An 
oblong box of stale and broken pastry at reduced prices, mounted 
on a stool, ornamented the doorway; and two high chairs that 
looked as if they were performing on stilts, embellished the counter. 
Over the whole, a young lady presided, whose gloomy haughtiness 
as she surveyed the street, announced a deep-seated grievance against 
society, and an implacable determination to be avenged. From a 
beetle-haunted kitchen below this institution, fumes arose, sug- 
gestive of a class of soup which Mr. Grazinglands knew, from 
painful experience, enfeebles the mind, distends the stomach, forces 
itself into the complexion, and tries to ooze out at the eyes. As 
he decided against entering, and turned away, Mrs. Grazinglands 
becoming perceptibly weaker, repeated, "I am rather faint, Alex- 
ander, but don't mind me." Urged to new efforts by these words 
of resignation, Mr. Grazinglands looked in at a cold and floury 
baker's shop, where utilitarian buns unrelieved by a currant, con- 
sorted with hard biscuits, a stone filter of cold water, a hard pale 
clock, and a hard little old woman with flaxen hair, of an undevel- 
oped-farinaceous aspect, as if she had been fed upon seeds. He 
might have entered even here, but for the timely remembrance 
coming upon him that Jairing's was but round the corner. 

Now, Jairing's being an hotel for families and gentlemen, in higli 
repute among the midland counties, Mr. Grazinglands plucked up 
a great spirit when he told Mrs. Grazinglands she should have a 
chop there. That lady, likewise felt that she was going to see 



48 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Life. Arriving on that gay and festive scene, they found the sec- 
ond waiter, in a flabby undress, cleaning the windows of the empty 
coffee-room ; and the first waiter, denuded of his white tie, making 
up his cruets behind the Post-Office Directory. The latter (who 
took them in hand) was greatly put out by their patronage, and 
showed his mind to be troubled by a sense of the pressing neces- 
sity of instantly smuggling Mrs. Grazinglands into the obscurest 
corner of the building. This slighted lady (who is the pride of 
her division of the county) was immediately conveyed, by several 
dark passages, and up and down several steps, into a penitential 
apartment at the back of the liouse, where five invalided old plate- 
warmers leaned up against one another under a discarded old 
melancholy sideboard, and where the wintry leaves of all the din- 
ing-tables in the house lay thick. Also, a sofa, of incomprehensible 
form regarded from any sofane point of view, murmured " Bed ; " 
while an air of mingled fluffiness and heeltaps, added, "Second 
Waiter's." Secreted in this dismal hold, objects of a mysterious 
distrust and suspicion, Mr. Grazinglands and his charming partner 
waited twenty minutes for the smoke (for it never came to a fire), 
twenty-five minutes for the sherry, half an hour for the tablecloth, 
forty minutes for the knives and forks, three-quarters of an hour 
for the chops, and an hour for the potatoes. On settling the little bill 
— which was not much more than the day's pay of a Lieutenant in 
the navy — Mr. G-razinglands took heart to remonstrate against the 
general quality and cost of his reception. To whom the waiter re- 
plied, substantially, that Jairing's made it a merit to have accepted 
him on any terms : " for," added the waiter (unmistakably coughing 
at Mrs. Grazinglands, the pride of her division of the county), "when 
indiwiduals is not staying in the 'Ouse, their favours is not as a rule 
looked upon as making it worth Mr. Jairing's while ; nor is it, indeed, 
a style of business Mr. Jairing wishes." Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Graz- 
inglands passed out of Jairing's hotel for Families and Gentlemen, 
in a state of the greatest depression, scorned by the bar ; and did 
not recover their self-respect for several days. 

Or take another case. Take your own case. 

You are going oft' by railway, from any Terminus. You have 
twenty minutes for dinner, before you go. You want your dinner, 
and like Dr. Johnson, Sir, you like to dine. You present to your 
mind, a picture of the refreshment-table at that terminus. The 
conventional shabby evening-party supper — accepted as the model 
for all termini and all refreshment stations, because it is the last 
repast known to this state of existence of which any human creat- 
ure would partake, but in the direst extremity — sickens your con- 
templation, and your words are these : "I cannot dine on stale 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 49 

sponge-cakes that turn to sand in the mouth. I cannot dine on 
shining brown patties, composed of unknown animals within, and 
offering to my view the device of an indigestible star-fish in leaden 
pie-crust without. I cannot dine on a sand\sich that has long been 
pining under an exhausted receiver. I cannot dine on barley-sugar. 
I cannot dine on Toflee." You repair to the nearest hotel, and 
arrive, agitated, in the coffee-room. 

It is a most astonishing fact that the waiter is very cold to you. 
Account for it how you may, smooth it over how you will, you can- 
not deny that he is cold to you. He is not glad to see you, he 
does not want you, he would much rather you hadn't come. He 
opposes to your flushed condition, an immovable composure. As 
if this were not enough, another waiter, born, as it would seem, 
expressly to look at you in this passage of your life, stands at a 
little distance, with his napkin under his arm and his hands folded, 
looking at you with all his might. You impress on your waiter 
that you have ten minutes for dinner, and he proposes that you 
shall begin with a bit of fish which will be ready in twenty. That 
proposal declined, he suggests — as a neat originality — "a weal 
or mutton cutlet." You close with either cutlet, any cutlet, any- 
thing. He goes, leisurely, behind a door and calls down some 
unseen shaft. A ventriloquial dialogue ensues, tending finally to 
the effect that weal only, is available on the spur of the moment. 
You anxiously call out, " Yeal, then ! " Your waiter having settled 
that point, returns to array your tablecloth, with a table napkin 
folded cocked-hat-wise (slowly, for something out of window engages 
his eye), a white wine-glass, a green wine-glass, a blue finger-glass, 
a tumbler, and a powerful field battery of fourteen castors with 
nothing in them ; or at all events — which is enough for your pur- 
pose — with nothing in them that will come out. All this time, 
the other waiter looks at you — with an air of mental comparison 
and curiosity, now, as if it had occurred to him that you are rather 
like his brother. Half your time gone, and nothing come but the 
jug of ale and the bread, you implore your waiter to '' See after 
that cutlet, waiter ; pray do ! '' He cannot go at once, for he is 
carrying in seventeen pounds of American cheese for you to finish 
with, and a small Landed Estate of celery and water-cresses. The 
other waiter changes his leg, and takes a new view of you, doubt- 
fully, now, as if he had rejected the resemblance to his brother, 
and had begim to think you more like his aunt or his grandmother. 
Again you beseech your waiter with pathetic indignation, to " see 
after that cutlet ! " He steps out to see after it, and by-and-bye, 
when you are going away without it, comes back with it. Even 
then, he will not take the sham silver-cover off, without a pause 



50 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

for a flourish, and a look at the musty cutlet as if he were surprised 
to see it — which cannot possibly be the case, he must have seen 
it so often before. A sort of fur has been produced upon its sur- 
face by the cook's art, and in a sham silver vessel staggering on 
two feet instead of three, is a cutaneous kind of sauce, of brown pim- 
ples and pickled cucumber. You order the bill, but your waiter 
cannot bring your bill yet, because he is bringing, instead, three 
flinty-hearted potatoes and two grim head of brocoli, like the occa- 
sional ornaments on area railings, badly boiled. You know that 
you will never come to this pass, any more than to the cheese and 
celery, and you imperatively demand your bill ; but, it takes time 
to get, even when gone for, because your waiter has to communi- 
cate with a lady who lives behind a sash-window in a corner, and 
who appears to have to refer to several Ledgers before she can make 
it out — as if you had been staying there a year. You become dis- 
tracted to get away, and the other waiter, once more changing his 
leg, still looks at you — but suspiciously, now, as if you had begun 
to remind him of the party who took the great-coats last winter. 
Your bill at last brought and paid, at the rate of sixpence a mouth- 
ful, your waiter reproachfully reminds you that " attendance is not 
charged for a single meal," and you have to search in all your pock- 
ets for sixpence more. He has a worse opinion of you than ever, 
when you have given it to him, and lets you out into the street 
with the air of one saying to himself, as you cannot doubt he is, 
" I hope we shall never see you here again ! " 

Or, take any other of the numerous travelling instances in which, 
with more time at your disposal, you are, have been, or may be, 
equally ill served. Take the old-established Bull's Head with its 
old-established knife-boxes on its old-established sideboards, its old- 
established flue under its old-established four-post bedsteads in its 
old-established airless rooms, its old-established frouziness up-stairs 
and down-stairs, its old-established cookery, and its old-established 
principles of plunder. Count up your injuries, in its side-dishes of 
ailing sweetbi'eads in white poultices, of apothecaries' powders in 
rice for curry, of pale stewed bits of calf ineffectually relying for 
an adventitious interest on forcemeat balls. You have had ex- 
perience of the old-established Bull's Head stringy fowls, with lower 
extremities like wooden legs, sticking up out of the dish ; of its 
cannibalic boiled mutton, gushing horribly among its capers, when 
carved ; of its little dishes of pastry — roofs of spermaceti ointment, 
erected over half an apple or four gooseberries. Well for you if 
you have yet forgotten the old-established Bull's Head fruity port : 
whose reputation was gained solely by the old-established price the 
Bull's Head put upon it, and by the old-established air with which 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 51 

the Bull's Head set the glasses and D'Oyleys on, and held that 
Liquid Gout to the three-and-sixpenny wax-candle, as if its old- 
established colour hadn't come from the dyer's. 

Or lastly, take to finish with, two cases that we all know, every 
day. 

We all know the new hotel near the station, where it is always 
gusty, going up the lane which is always muddy, where we are 
sure to arrive at night, and where we make the gas start awfully 
when we open the front door. We all know the flooring of the 
passages and staircases that is too new, and the walls that are too 
new, and the house that is haunted by the ghost of mortar. We 
all know the doors that have cracked, and the cracked shutters 
through which we get a glimpse of the disconsolate moon. We all 
know the new people, who have come to keep the new hotel, and 
who wish they had never come, and who (inevitable result) wish we 
had never come. We all know how much too scant and smooth and 
briglit the new furniture is, and how it has never settled down, 
and cannot fit itself into right places, and will get into wrong places. 
We ail know how the gas, being lighted, shows maps of Damp 
upon the walls. We all know how the ghost of mortar passes into 
our sandwich, stirs our negus, goes up to bed with us, ascends the 
pale bedroom chimney, and prevents the smoke from following. 
We all know how a leg of our chair comes ofi" at breakfast in the 
morning, and how the dejected waiter attributes the accident to a 
general greenness pervading the establishment, and informs us, in 
reply to a local inquiry, that he is thankful to say he is an entire 
stranger in that part of the country, and is going back to his own 
connection on Saturday. 

We all know, on the other hand, the great station hotel belong- 
ing to the company of proprietors, which has suddenly sprung up 
in the back outskirts of any place we like to name, and where we 
look out of our palatial windows, at little back yards and gardens, 
old summer-houses, fowl-houses, pigeon-traps, and pigsties. We all 
know this hotel in which we can get anything we want, after its 
kind, for money ; but where nobody is glad to see us, or sorry to 
see us, or minds (our bill paid) whether we come or go, or how, 
or when, or why, or cares about us. We all know this hotel, 
where we have no individuality, but put ourselves into the general 
post, as it were, and are sorted and disposed of according to our 
division. We all know that we can get on very well indeed at 
such a place, but still not perfectly well ; and this may be, because 
the place is largely wholesale, and there is a lingering personal retail 
interest within us that asks to be satisfied. 

To sum up. My uncommercial travelling has not yet brought 



52 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

me to the conclusion that we are close to perfection in these matters. 
And just as I do not believe that the end of the world will ever be 
near at hand, so long as any of the very tiresome and arrogant 
people who constantly predict that catastrophe are left in it, so, I 
shall have small faith in the Hotel Millennium, while any of the 
uncomfortable superstitions I have glanced at remain in existence. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 2, No. 50, April 7, 1860. 
VII. 

TRAVELLING ABROAD. 

I GOT into the travelling chariot — it was of German make, 
roomy, heavy, and unvarnished — I got into the travelling chariot, 
pulled up the steps after me, shut myself in with a smart bang of 
the door, and gave the word, "Go on ! " 

Immediately, all that W. and S. AV. division of London began to 
slide away at a pace so lively, that I was over the river, and past 
the Old Kent Koad, and out on Blackheath, and even ascending 
Shooter's Hill, before I had had time to look about me in the car- 
riage, like a collected traveller. 

I had two ample Imperials on the roof, other fitted storage for 
luggage in front, and other up behind ; I had a net for books over- 
head, great pockets to all the windows, a leathern pouch or two 
hung up for odds and ends, and a reading lamp fixed in the back of 
the chariot, in case I should be benighted. I was amply provided 
in all respects, and had no idea where I was going (which was 
delightful), except that I was going abroad. 

So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the horses, 
and so fast went I, that it was midway between Gravesend and 
Rochester, and the widening river was bearing the ships, white- 
sailed or black-smoked, out to sea, when I noticed by the wayside 
a very queer small boy. 

" Holloa ! " said I, to the very queer small boy, "where do vou 
live 1 " 

"At Chatham," says he. 

" What do you do there 1 " says I. 

" I go to school," says he. 

I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the 
very queer small boy says, " This is Gads-hill we are coming to, 
where Falstaff" went out to rob those travellers, and ran away." 

" You know something about Falstaff", eh ? " said I. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 53 

"All about him," said the very queer small boy. " I am old 
(I am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at 
the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please ! " 

"You admire that house? " said I. 

" Bless you, sir," said the very queer small boy, " when I was not 
more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me to be 
brought to look at it. And now, I am nine, I come by myself to 
look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father, seeing me 
so fond of it, has often said to me, ' If you were to be very persever- 
ing and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in 
it.' Though that's impossible ! " said the very queer small boy, 
drawing a low breath, and now staring at the house out of window 
with all his might. 

I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small boy ; 
for that house happens to be my house, and I have reason to believe 
that what he said was true. 

Well ! I made no halt there, and I soon dropped the very queer 
small boy and went on. Over the road where the old Romans used 
to march, over the road where the old Canterbury pilgrims used to 
go, over the road where the travelling trains of the old imperious 
priests and princes used to jingle on horseback between the conti- 
nent and this Island through the mud and water, over the road 
where Shakespeare hummed to himself, " Blow, blow, thou winter 
wind," as he sat in the saddle at the gate of the inn yard noticing 
the carriers ; all among the cherry orchards, apple orchards, corn- 
fields and hop-gardens ; so went I, by Canterbury to Dover. There, 
the sea was tumbling in, with deep sounds, after dark, and the re- 
volving French light on Cape G-rinez was seen regularly bursting 
out and becoming obscured, as if the head of a gigantic light-keeper 
in an anxious state of mind were interposed every half minute, to 
look how it was burning. 

Early in the morning I was on the deck of the steam-packet, and 
we were aiming at the bar in the usual intolerable manner, and the 
bar was aiming at us in the usual intolerable manner, and the bar 
got by far the best of it, and we got by far the worst — aU in the 
usual intolerable manner. 

But, when I was clear of the Custom House on the other side, 
and when I began to make the dust fly on the thirsty French roads, 
and when the twigsome trees by the wayside (which, I suppose, 
never will grow leafy, for they never did) guarded here and there a 
dusty soldier, or field labourer, baking on a heap of broken stones, 
sound asleep in a fiction of shade, I began to recover my travelling 
spirits. Coming upon the breaker of the broken stones, in a hard 
hot shining hat, on which the sun played at a distance as on a 



54 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

burning-glass, I felt that now, indeed, I was in the dear old France 
of my affections. I should have known it, without the well-remem- 
bered bottle of rough ordinary wine, the cold roast fowl, the loaf, 
and the i^inch of salt, on which I lunched with unspeakable satisfac- 
tion, from one of the stuffed pockets of the chariot. 

I must have fallen asleep after lunch, for when a bright face 
looked in at the window, I started, and said : 

"Good God, Louis, I dreamed you were dead ! " 

My cheerful servant laughed, and answered : 

"Me? Not at all, sir." 

" How glad I am to wake ! What are we doing, Louis 1 " 

" We go to take relay of horses. Will you walk up the hill ? " 

" Certainly." 

Welcome the old French hill, with the old French lunatic (not 
in the most distant degree related to Sterne's Maria) living in a 
thatched dog-kennel half way up, and flying out with his crutch 
and his big head and extended nightcap, to be beforehand with the 
old men and women exhibiting crippled children, and with the 
children exhibiting old men and women, ugly and blind, who always 
seemed by resurrectionary process to be recalled out of the elements 
for the sudden peopling of the solitude ! 

"It is well," said I, scattering among them what small coin I 
had; "here comes Louis, and I am quite roused from my nap." 

We journeyed on again, and I welcomed every new assurance 
that France stood where I had left it. There were the posting- 
houses, with their archways, dirty stable-yards, and clean post- 
masters' Avives, bright women of business, looking on at the putting- 
to of the horses ; there were the postilions counting what money 
they got, into their hats, and never making enough of it ; there 
were the standard population of grey horses of Flanders descent, 
invariably biting one another when they got a chance ; there were 
the fleecy sheepskins, looped on over their uniforms by the postil- 
ions, like bibbed aprons when it blew and rained ; there were their 
jack-boots, and their cracking whips; there were the cathedrals 
that I got out to see, as under some cruel bondage, in no wise de- 
siring to see them ; there were the little towns that appeared to 
have no reason for being towns, since most of their houses were to 
let and nobody could be induced to look at them, except the people 
who couldn't let them and had nothing else to do but look at them 
all day. I lay a night upon the road and enjoyed delectable cook- 
ery of potatoes, and some other sensible things, adoption of which 
at home would inevitably be shown to be fraught with ruin, some- 
how or other, to that rickety national blessing, the British farmer; 
and at last I was rattled, like a single pill in a box, over leagues of 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 55 

stones, until — madly cracking, plunging, and flourishing two grey- 
tails about — I made my triumphal entry into Paris. 

At Paris, I took an upper apartment for a few days in one of the 
hotels of the Rue de Rivoli ; my front windows looking into the 
garden of the Tuileries (where the principal difference between 
the nursemaids and the flowers seemed to be that the former were 
locomotive and the latter not) : my back windows looking at all 
the other back windows in the hotel, and deep down into a paved 
yard, where my German chariot had retired under a tight-fitting 
archway, to all appearance for life, and where bells rang all day 
without anybody's minding them but certain chamberlains with 
feather brooms and green baize caps, who here and there leaned 
out of some high window placidly looking down, and where neat 
waiters with trays on their left shoulders passed and repassed from 
morning to night. 

Whenever I am at Paris, I am dragged by invisible force into 
the Morgue. I never want to go there, but am always pulled 
there. One Christmas Day, when I would rather have been any- 
where else, I was attracted in, to see an old grey man lying all 
alone on his cold bed, with a tap of water turned on over his grey 
hair, and running, drip, drip, drip, down his wretched face until it 
got to the corner of his mouth, where it took a turn, and made 
him look sly. One New Year's Morning (by the same token, the 
sun was shining outside, and there was a mountebank balancing a 
feather on his nose, within a yard of the gate), I was pulled in 
again to look at a flaxen-haired boy of eighteen, with a heart hang- 
ing on his breast — " from his mother," was engraven on it — who 
had come into the net across the river, with a bullet wound in his 
fair forehead and his hands cut with a knife, but whence or how 
was a blank mystery. This time, I was forced into the same dread 
place, to see a large dark man whose disfigurement by water was 
in a frightful manner, comic, and whose expression was that of a 
prize-fighter who had closed his eyelids under a heavy blow, but 
was going immediately to open them, shake his head, and "come 
up smiling." Oh what this large dark man cost me in that bright 
city! 

It was very hot weather, and he was none the better for that, 
and I was much the worse. Indeed, a very neat and pleasant little 
woman with the key of her lodging on her forefinger, who had been 
showing him to her little girl while she and the child ate sweet- 
meats, observed monsieur looking poorly as we came out together, 
and asked monsieur, with her wondering little eyebrows prettily 
raised, if there were anything the matter 1 Faintly replying in the 
negative, monsieur crossed the road to a wine-shop, got some 



66 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

brandy, and resolved to freshen himself with a dip in the great 
floating bath on the river. 

The bath was crowded in the usual airy manner, by a male pop- 
ulation in striped drawers of various gay colours, who walked up 
and down arm in arm, drank coffee, smoked cigars, sat at little 
tables, conversed politely with the damsels who dispensed the 
towels, and every now and then pitched themselves into the river 
head foremost, and came out again to repeat this social routine. I 
made haste to participate in the water part of the entertainments, 
and was in the full enjoyment of a delightful bath, when all in a 
moment I was seized with an unreasonable idea that the large dark 
body was floating straight at me. 

I was out of the river, and dressing instantly. In the shock I 
had taken some water into my mouth, and it turned me sick, for 
I fancied that the contamination of the creature was in it. I had 
got back to my cool darkened room in the hotel, and was lying on 
a sofa there, before I began to reason with myself. 

Of course, I knew perfectly well that the large dark creature 
was stone dead, and that I should no more come upon him out of 
the place where I had seen him dead, than I should come upon 
the cathedral of Notre-Dame in an entirely new situation. What 
troubled me was the picture of the creature ; and that had so curi- 
ously and strongly painted itself upon my brain, that I could not 
get rid of it until it was worn out. 

I noticed the peculiarities of this possession, while it was a real 
discomfort to me. That very day, at dinner, some morsel on my 
plate looked like a piece of him, and I was glad to get up and 
go out. Later in the evening, I was walking along the Rue St. 
Honord, when I saw a bill at a public room there, announcing 
small-sword exercise, broad-sword exercise, wrestling, and other 
such feats. I went in, and some of the sword-play being very 
skilful, remained. A specimen of our own national sport. The 
British Boaxe, was announced to be given at the close of the 
evening. In an evil hour, I determined to wait for this Boaxe, as 
became a Briton. It was a clumsy specimen (executed by two 
English grooms out of place), but one of the combatants, receiving 
a straight right-hander with the glove between his eyes, did exactly 
what the large dark creature in the Morgue had seemed going to 
do — and finished me for that night. 

There was rather a sickly smell (not at all an unusual fragrance 
in Paris) in the Httle ante-room of my apartment at the hotel. 
The large dark creature in the Morgue was by no direct experience 
associated with my sense of smell, because, when I came to the 
knowledge of him, he lay behind a wall of thick plate-glass as good 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAyELLER. 67 

as a wall of steel or marble for that matter. Yet the whiff of the 
room never failed to reproduce him. What was more curious, was 
the capriciousness with which his portrait seemed to light itself up 
in my mind, elsewhere. I might be walking in the Palais Royal, 
lazily enjoying the shop windows, and might be regaling myself 
with one of the ready-made clothes shops that are set out there. 
My eyes, wandering over impossible-waisted dressing-gowns and 
luminous waistcoats, would fall upon the master, or the shopman, 
or even the very dummy at the door, and would suggest to me, 
" Something like him ! " — and instantly I was sickened again. 

This would happen at the theatre, in the same manner. Often 
it would happen in the street, when I certainly was not looking for 
the likeness, and when probably there was no likeness there. It 
was not because the creature was dead that I was so haunted, 
because I know that I might have been (and I know it because 
I have been) equally attended by the image of a living aversion. 
This lasted about a week. The picture did not fade by degrees, 
in the sense that it became a whit less forcible and distinct, but 
in the sense that it obtnided itself less and less frequently. The 
experience may be worth considering by some who have the care 
of children. It would be difficult to overstate the intensity and 
accuracy of an intelligent child's observation. At that impressible 
time of life, it must sometimes produce a fixed impression. If the 
fixed impression be of an object terrible to the child, it will be (for 
want of reasoning upon) inseparable from great fear. Force the 
child at sucli a time, be Spartan with it, send it into the dark 
against its will, leave it in a lonely bedroom against its will, and 
you had better murder it. 

On a bright morning I rattled away from Paris, in the German 
chariot, and left the large dark creature behind me for good. I 
ought to confess, though, that I had been drawn back to the 
Morgue, after he was put underground, to look at his clothes, and 
that I found them frightfully like him — particularly his boots. 
However, I rattled away for Switzerland, looking forward and not 
backward, and so we parted company. 

Welcome again, the long long spell of France, with the queer coun- 
try inns, full of vases of flowers and clocks, in the dull little towns, 
and with the little population not at all dull on the little Boule- 
vard in the evening, under the little trees ! Welcome Monsieur 
the Curd walking alone in the early morning a short way out 
of the town, reading that eternal Breviary of yours, which surely 
might be almost read, without book, by this time ! Welcome 
Monsieur the Curd, later in the day, jolting through the highway 
dust (as if you had already ascended to the cloudy region), in a 



58 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

very big-headed cabriolet, with the dried mud of a dozen winters 
on it. Welcome again Monsieur the Cur^, as we exchange saluta- 
tions ; you, straightening your back to look at the German chariot, 
while picking in your little village garden a vegetable or two for 
the day's soup : I, looking out of the German chariot window 
in that delicious traveller's trance which knows no cares, no yes- 
terdays, no to-morrows, nothing but the passing objects and the 
passing scents and sounds ! And so I came, in due course of 
delight, to Strasbourg, where I passed a wet Sunday evening at 
a window, while an idle trifle of a vaudeville was played for me 
at the opposite house. 

How such a large house came to have only three people living 
in it, was its own affair. There were at least a score of windows 
in its high roof alone ; how many in its grotesque front, I soon gave 
up counting. The owner was a shopkeeper, by name Strauden- 
heim ; by trade — I couldn't make out what by trade, for he had 
forborne to write that up, and his shop was shut. 

At first, as I looked at Straudenheim's, through the steadily 
falling rain, I set him up in business in the goose-liver line. 
But, inspection of Straudenheim, who became visible at a window 
on the second floor, convinced me that there was something more 
precious than liver in the case. He wore a black velvet skull- 
cap, and looked usurious and rich. A large-lipped, pear-nosed 
old man, with white hair, and keen eyes, though near-sighted. 
He was writing at a desk, was Straudenheim, and ever and again 
left off writing, put his pen in his mouth, and went through 
actions with his right hand, like a man steadying piles of cash. 
Five-franc pieces, Straudenheim, or golden Napoleons ? A jewel- 
ler, Straudenheim, a dealer in money, a diamond merchant, or 
what? 

Below Straudenheim, at a window on the first floor, ' sat his 
housekeeper — far from young, but of a comely presence, sugges- 
tive of a well-matured foot .and ankle. She was cheerily dressed, 
had a fan in her hand, and wore large gold earrings and a large 
gold cross. She would have been out holiday-making (as I settled 
it) but for the pestilent rain. Strasbourg had given up holiday- 
making for that once, as a bad job, because the rain was jerking in 
gushes out of the old roof-spouts, and running in a brook down the 
middle of the street. The housekeeper, her arms folded on her 
bosom and her fan tapping her chin, was bright and smiling at her 
open window, but otherwise Straudenheim's house front was very 
dreary. The housekeeper's was the only open window in it; 
Straudenheim kept himself close, though it was a sultry evening 
when air is pleasant, and though the rain had brought into the 



THE UNCOMMEECIAL TRAVELLER. 59 

town that vague refreshing smell of grass which rain does bring in 
the summer-time. 

The dim appearance of a man at Straudenheim's shoulder, in- 
spired me with a misgiving that somebody had come to murder 
that flourishing merchant for the wealth with which I had hand- 
somely endowed him : the rather, as it was an excited man, lean 
and long of figure, and evidently stealthy of foot. But, he con- 
ferred with Straudenheim instead of doing him a mortal injury, 
and then they both softly opened the other window of that room 
— which was immediately over the housekeeper's — and tried to 
see her by looking down. And my opinion of Straudenheim was 
much lowered when I saw that eminent citizen spit out of window, 
clearly with the hope of spitting on the housekeeper. 

The unconscious housekeeper fanned herself, tossed her head, 
and laughed. Though unconscious of Straudenheim, she was con- 
scious of somebody else — of me ? — there was nobody else. 

After leaning so far out of the window, that I confidently ex- 
pected to see their heels tilt up, Straudenheim and the lean man 
drew their heads in and shut the window. Presently, the house 
door secretly opened, and they slowly and spitefully crept forth 
into the pouring rain. They were coming over to me (I thought) 
to demand satisfaction for my looking at the housekeeper, when 
they plunged into a recess in the architecture under my window 
and dragged out the puniest of little soldiers, begirt with the most 
innocent of little swords. The tall glazed head-dress of this war- 
rior, Straudenheim instantly knocked off, and out of it fell two 
sugar-sticks, and three or four large lumps of sugar. 

The warrior made no effort to recover his property or to pick up 
his shako, but looked with an expression of attention at Strauden- 
heim when he kicked him five times, and also at the lean man 
when he kicked him five times, and again at Straudenheim when 
he tore the breast of his (the warrior's) little coat open, and shook 
all his ten fingers in his face, as if they were ten thousand. When 
these outrages had been committed, Straudenheim and his man 
went into the house again and barred the door. A wonderful 
circumstance was, that the housekeeper who saw it all (and who 
could have taken six such warriors to her buxom bosom at once), 
only fanned herself and laughed as she had laughed before, and 
seemed to have no opinion about it, one way or other. 

But, the chief effect of the drama was the remarkable vengeance 
taken by the little warrior. Left alone in the rain, he picked up 
his shako ; put it on, all wet and dirty as it was ; retired into a 
court, of which Straudenheim's house formed the corner ; wheeled 
about; and bringing his two forefingers close to the top of his 



60 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

nose, rubbed them over one another, crosswise, in derision, de- 
j&ance, and contempt of Straudenheim. Although Straudenheim 
could not possibly be supposed to be conscious of this strange 
proceeding, it so inflated and comforted the little warrior's soul, 
that twice he went away, and twice came back into the court to 
repeat it, as though it must goad his enemy to madness. Not 
only that, but he afterwards came back with two other small war- 
riors, and they all three did it together. Not only that — as I 
live to tell the tale ! — but just as it was falling quite dark, 
the three came back, bringing with them a huge bearded Sapper, 
whom they moved, by recital of the original wrong, to go through 
the same performance, with the same complete absence of all pos- 
sible knowledge of it on the part of Straudenheim. And then 
they all went away, arm in arm, singing. 

I went away too, in the German chariot at sunrise, and rattled 
on, day after day, like one in a sweet dream ; with so many clear 
little bells on the harness of the horses, that the nursery rhyme 
about Banbury Cross and the venerable lady who rode in state 
there, was always in my ears. And now I came to the land of 
wooden houses, innocent cakes, thin butter soup, and spotless little 
inn bedrooms with a family likeness to Dairies. And now the 
Swiss marksmen were for ever rifle-shooting at marks across 
gorges, so exceedingly near my ear, that I felt like a new Gesler 
in a Canton of Tells, and went in highly-deserved danger of my 
tyrannical life. The prizes at these shootings, were watches, smart 
handkerchiefs, hats, spoons, and (above all) tea-trays ; and at these 
contests I came upon a more than usually accomplished and amia- 
ble countryman of my own, who had shot himself deaf in whole 
years of competition, and had won so many tea-trays that he went 
about the country with his carriage full of them, like a glorified 
Cheap- Jack. 

In the mountain-country into which I had now travelled, a 
yoke of oxen were sometimes hooked on before the post-horses, 
and I went lumbering up, up, up, through mist and rain, with the 
roar of falling water for change of music. Of a sudden, mist and 
rain would clear away, and I would come down into picturesque 
little towns with gleaming spires and odd towers ; and would stroll 
afoot into market-places in steep winding streets, where a hundred 
women in bodices, sold eggs and honey, butter and fruit, and suckled 
their children as they sat by their clean baskets, and had such enor- 
mous goitres (or glandular swellings in the throat) that it became 
a science to know where the nurse ended and the child began. 
About this time,' I deserted my German chariot for the back of a 
mule (in colour and consistency so very like a dusty old hair trunk 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 61 

I once had at school, that I half- expected to see my initials in brass- 
headed nails on his backbone), and went up a thousand rugged 
ways, and looked down at a thousand woods of fir and pine, and 
would on the whole have preferred my mule's keeping a little nearer 
to the inside, and not usually travelling with a hoof or two over the 
precipice — though much consoled by explanation that this was to 
be attributed to his great sagacity, by reason of his carrying broad 
loads of wood at other times, and not being clear but that I myself 
belonged to that station of life, and required as much room as they. 
He brought me safely, in his own wise way, among the passes of 
the Alps, and here I enjoyed a dozen climates a day ; being now 
(like Don Quixote on the back of the wooden horse) in the region 
of wind, now in the region of fire, now in the region of unmelting 
ice and snow. Here, I passed orer trembling domes of ice, beneath 
which the cataract was roaring; and here was received under arches 
of icicles, of unspeakable beauty ; and here the sweet air was so 
bracing and so light, that at halting-times I rolled in the snow 
when I saw my mule do it, thinking that he must know best. At 
this part of the journey we would come, at midday, into half an 
hour's thaw : when the rough mountain inn would be found on an 
island of deep mud in a sea of snow, while the baiting strings of 
mules, and the carts full of casks and bales, which had been in an 
Arctic condition a mile off, would steam again. By such ways 
and means, I would come to the cluster of chalets where I had to 
turn out of the track to see the waterfall ; and then, uttering a 
howl like a young giant, on espying a traveller — in other words, 
something to eat — -coming up the steep, the idiot lying on the 
wood-pile who sunned himself and nursed his goitre, would rouse 
the woman-guide within the hut, who would stream out hastily, 
thro^ving her child over one of her shoulders and her goitre over 
the other, as she came along. I slept at religious houses, and 
bleak refuges of many kinds, on this journey, and by the stove at 
night heard stories of travellers who had perished within call, in 
wreaths and drifts of snow. One night the stove within, and the 
cold outside, awakened childish associations long forgotten, and I 
dreamed I was in Russia — the identical serf out of a picture-book 
I had, before I could read it for myself — and that I was going to 
be knouted by a noble personage in a fur cap, boots, and earrings, 
who, I think, must have come out of some melodrama. 

Commend me to the beautiful waters among these mountains ! 
Though I was not of their mind : they, being inveterately bent on 
getting down into the level country, and I ardently desiring to 
linger where I was. What desperate leaps they took, what dark 
abysses they plunged into, what rocks they wore away, what echoes 



62 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

they invoked ! In one part where I went, they were pressed into 
the service of carrying wood down, to be burnt next winter, as 
costly fuel, in Italy. But, their fierce savage nature was not to 
be easily constrained, and they fought with every limb of the wood ; 
whirling it round and round, stripping its bark away, dashing it 
against pointed corners, driving it out of the course, and roaring 
and flying at the peasants who steered it back again from the bank 
with long stout poles. Alas ! concurrent streams of time and water 
carried me down fast, and I came, on an exquisitely clear day, to 
the Lausanne shore of the Lake of Geneva, where I stood looking 
at the bright blue water, the flushed white mountains opposite, 
and the boats at my feet with their furled Mediterranean sails, 
showing like enormous magnifications of this goose-quill pen that 
is now in my hand. 

— The sky became overcast without any notice ; a wind very 
like the March east wind of England, blew across me ; and a voice 
said, " How do you like it 1 Will it do 1 " 

I had merely shut myself, for half a minute, in a German travel- 
ling chariot that stood for sale in the Carriage Department of the 
London Pantechnicon. I had a commission to buy it, for a friend 
who was going abroad ; and the look and manner of the chariot, 
as I tried the cushions and the springs, brought all these hints of 
travelling remembrance before me. 

"It will do very well," said I, rather sorrowfully, as I got out 
at the other door, and shut the carriage up. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 3, No. 52, April 21, 1860. 
VIII. 

THE GREAT TASMANIA'S CARGO. 

I TRAVEL constantly, up and down a certain line of railway that 
has a terminus in London. It is the railway for a large military- 
depot, and for other large barracks. To the best of my serious 
belief, I have never been on that railway by daylight, without 
seeing some handcuffed deserters in the train. 

It is in the nature of things that such an institution as our 
English army should have many bad and troublesome characters 
in it. But, this is a reason for, and not against, its being made 
as acceptable as possible to well-disposed men of decent behaviour. 
Such men are assuredly not tempted into the ranks, by the beastly 
inversion of natural laws, and the compulsion to live in worse than 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 03 

swinish foulness. Accordingly, when any such Circumlocutional 
embellishments of the soldier's condition have of late been brought 
to notice, we civilians, seated in outer darkness cheerfully meditat- 
ing on an Income Tax, have considered the matter as being our 
business, and have shown a tendency to declare that we would 
rather not have it misregulated, if such declaration may, without 
violence to the Church Catechism, be hinted to those who are put 
in authority over us. 

Any animated description of a modern battle, any private soldier's 
letter published in the newspapers, any page of the records of the 
Victoria Cross, will show that in the ranks of the army, there 
exists under all disadvantages as fine a sense of duty as is to be 
found in any station on earth. Who doubts that if we all did our 
duty as faithfully as the soldier does his, this world would be a 
better place 1 There may be greater difficulties in our way than 
in the soldier's. Not disputed. But, let us at least do our duty 
towards hini. 

I had got back again to that rich and beautiful port where I 
had looked after Mercantile Jack, and I was walking up a hill 
there, on a wild March morning. My conversation with my official 
friend Pangloss, by whom I was accidentally accompanied, took this 
direction as we took the up-hill direction, because the object of my 
uncommercial journey was to see some discharged soldiers who had 
recently come home from India. There were men of Havelock's 
among them ; there were men who had been in many of the great 
battles of the great Indian campaign, among them ; and I was curi- 
ous to note what our discharged soldiers looked like, when they 
were done with. 

I was not the less interested (as I mentioned to my official friend 
Pangloss) because these men had claimed to be discharged, when 
their right to be discharged was not admitted. They had behaved 
with unblemished fidelity and bravery ; but, a change of circum- 
stances had arisen, which, as they considered, put an end to their 
compact and entitled them to enter on a new one. Their demand 
had been blunderingly resisted by the authorities in India ; but, 
it is to be presumed that the men were not far wrong, inasmuch 
as the bungle had ended in their being sent home discharged, in 
pursuance of orders from home. (There was an immense waste of 
money, of course.) 

Under these circumstances — thought I, as I walked up the 
hill, on which I accidentally encountered my official friend — under 
these circumstances of the men having successfully opposed them- 
selves to the Pagoda Department of that great Circumlocution 
Office on which the sun never sets and the light of reason never 



64 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

rises, the Pagoda Department will have been particularly careful 
of the national honour. It will have shown these men, in the 
scrupulous good faith, not to say the generosity, of its dealing 
with them, that great national authorities can have no small re- 
taliations and revenges. It will have made every provision for 
their health on the passage home, and will ,have landed them, 
restored from their campaigning fatigues by a sea-voyage, pure air, 
sound food, and good medicines. And I pleased myself with dwell- 
ing beforehand, on the great accounts of their personal treatment 
which these men would carry into their various towns and villages, 
and on the increasing popularity of the service that would insen- 
sibly follow. I almost began to hope that the hitherto-never-failing 
deserters on my railroad would by-and-bye become a phenomenon. 

In this agreeable frame of mind I entered the workhouse of 
Liverpool. — For, the cultivation of laurels in a sandy soil, had 
brought the soldiers in question to that abode of Glory. 

Before going into their wards to visit them, I inquired how they 
had made their triumphant entry there 1 They had been brought 
through the rain in carts, it seemed, from the landing-place to the 
gate, and had then been carried up-stairs on the backs of paupers. 
Their groans and pains during the performance of this glorious 
pageant, had been so distressing, as to bring tears into the eyes of 
spectators but too well accustomed to scenes of suffering. The 
men were so dreadfully cold, that those who could get near the 
fires were hard to be restrained from thrusting their feet in among 
the blazing coals. They were so horribly reduced, that they were 
awful to look upon. Racked with dysentery and blackened with 
scurvy, one hundred and forty wretched soldiers had been revived 
with brandy and laid in bed. 

My official friend Pangloss is lineally descended from a learned 
doctor of that name, who was once tutor to Candide, an ingenious 
young gentleman of some celebrity. In his personal character, he 
is as humane and worthy a gentleman as any I know ; in his official 
capacity, he unfortunately preaches the doctrines of his renowned 
ancestor, by demonstrating on all occasions that we live in the best 
of all possible official worlds. 

" In the name of Humanity," said I, "how did the men fall into 
this deplorable state 1 Was the ship well found in stores 1 " 

" I am not here to asseverate that I know the fact, of my own 
knowledge," answered Pangloss, " but I have grounds for asserting 
that the stores were the best of all possible stores." 

A medical officer laid before us, a handful of rotten biscuit, and 
a handful of split peas. The biscuit was a honeycombed heap of 
maggots, and the excrement of maggots. The peas were even 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 65 

harder than this filth. A similar handful had been experimentally 
boiled six hours, and had shown no signs of softening. These were 
the stores on which the soldiers had been fed. 

"The beef " I began, w^hen Pangloss cut me short. 

" Was the best of all possible beef," said he. 

But, behold, there w^as laid before us certain evidence given at 
the Coroner's Inquest, holden on some of the men (who had obsti- 
nately died of their treatment), and from that evidence it appeared 
that the beef was the worst of possible beef ! 

" Then I lay my hand upon my heart, and take my stand," said 
Pangloss, " by the pork, which was the best of all possible pork." 

" But look at this food before our eyes, if one may so misuse the 
w^ord," said I. "Would any Inspector who did his duty, pass such 
abomination 1 " 

"It ought not to have been passed," Pangloss admitted. 

" Then the authorities out there " I began, when Pangloss 

cut me short again. 

" There would certainly seem to have been something wrong some- 
where," said he; "but I am prepared to prove that the authorities 
out there, are the best of all possible authorities." 

I never heard of any impeached public authority in my life, who 
was not the best public authority in existence. 

" We are told of these unfortunate men being laid low by scurvy," 
said I. "Since lime-juice has been regularly stored and served out 
in our navy, surely that disease, which used to devastate it, has 
almost disappeared? Was there lime-juice aboard this trans- 
port?" 

My official friend was beginning " the best of all possible " 

when an inconvenient medical forefinger pointed out another pas- 
sage in the evidence, from which it appeared that the lime-juice 
had been bad too. Not to mention that the vinegar had been bad 
too, the vegetables bad too, the cooking accommodation insufficient 
(if there had been anything worth mentioning to cook), the water 
supply exceedingly inadequate, and the beer sour. 

"Then the men," said Pangloss, a little irritated, "were the 
worst of all possible men." 

" In what respect ? " I asked. 

" Oh ! Habitual drunkards," said Pangloss. 

But, again the same incorrigible medical forefinger pointed out 
another passage in the evidence, showing that the dead men had 
been examined after death, and that they, at least, could not possi- 
bly have been habitual drunkards, because the organs wdthin them 
which must have shown traces of that habit, were perfectly sound. 

"And besides," said the three doctors present, one and all, 



66 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

"habitual drunkards brought as low as these men have been, 
could not recover under care and food, as the great majority of 
these men are recovering. They would not have strength of con- 
stitution to do it." 

" Reckless and improvident dogs, then," said Pangloss. " Always 
are — nine times out of ten." 

I turned to the master of the workhouse, and asked him whether 
the men had any money ? 

" Money ? " said he. "I have in my iron safe, nearly four 
hundred pounds of theirs; the agents have nearly a hundred 
pounds more ; and many of them have left money in Indian banks 
besides." 

" Hah !" said I to myself, as we went up-stairs, "this is not the 
best of all possible stories, I doubt ! " 

We went into a large ward, containing some twenty or five-and- 
twenty beds. We went into several such wards, one after another. 
I find it very difficult to indicate what a shocking sight I saw in 
them, without frightening the reader from the perusal of these 
lines, and defeating my object of making it known. 

the sunken eyes that turned to me as I walked between the 
rows of beds, or — worse still — that glazedly looked at the white 
ceiling, and saw nothing and cared for nothing ! Here, lay the 
skeleton of a man, so lightly covered with a thin unwholesome skin, 
that not a bone in the anatomy was clothed, and I could clasp the 
arm above the elbow, in my finger and thumb. Here, lay a man 
with the black scurvy eating his legs away, his gums gone, and his 
teeth all gaunt and bare. This bed was empty, because gangrene 
had set in, and the patient had died but yesterday. That bed was 
a hopeless one, because its occupant was sinking fast, and could 
only be roused to turn the poor pinched mask of face upon the 
pillow, with a feeble moan. The awful thinness of the fallen 
cheeks, the awful brightness of the deep set eyes, the lips of lead, 
the hands of ivory, the recumbent human images lying in the 
shadow of death with a kind of solemn twilight on them, like the 
sixty who had died aboard the sh^p and were lying at the bottom 
of the sea, Pangloss, G-od forgive you ! 

In one bed, lay a man whose life had been saved (as it was 
hoped) by deep incisions in the feet and legs. While I was speak- 
ing to him, a nurse came up to change the poultices which this 
operation had rendered necessary, and I had an instinctive feeling 
that it was not well to turn away, merely to spare myself He 
was sorely wasted and keenly susceptible, but the efforts he made 
to subdue any expression of impatience or suffering, were quite 
heroic. It was easy to see, in the shrinking of the figure, and the 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 67 

drawing of the bed-clothes over the head, how acute the endurance 
was, and it made me shrink too, as if / were in pain ; but, when 
the new bandages were on, and the poor feet were composed again, 
he made an apology for himself (though he had not uttered a word), 
and said plaintively, "I am so tender and weak, you see, sir ! " 
Neither from him nor from any one sufferer of the whole ghastly 
number, did I hear a complaint. Of thankfulness for present solic- 
itude and care, I heard much ; of complaint, not a word. 

I think I could have recognised in the dismalest skeleton there, the 
ghost of a soldier. Something of the old air was still latent in 
the palest shadow of life I talked to. One emaciated creature, in 
the strictest literality worn to the bone, lay stretched on his back, 
looking so like death that I asked one of the doctors if he were not 
dying, or dead ? A few kind words from the doctor, in his ear, 
and he opened his eyes, and smiled — looked, in a moment, as if 
he would have made a salute, if he could, "We shall pull him 
through, please God," said the Doctor. "Plase God, surr, and 
thankye," said the patient. "You are much better to-day; are 
you not 1 " said the Doctor. " Plase God, surr ; 'tis the slape I 
want, surr; 'tis my breathin' makes the nights so long." "He 
is a careful fellow this, you must know," said the Doctor, cheer- 
fully; "it was raining hard when they put him in the open cart to 
bring him here, and he had the presence of mind to ask to have a 
sovereign taken out of his pocket that he had there, and a cab en- 
gaged. Probably it saved his life." The patient rattled out the 
skeleton of a laugh, and said, proud of the story, " 'Deed, surr, an 
open cairt was a comical means o' bringin' a dyin' man here, and a 
clever way to kill him." You might have sworn to him for a sol- 
dier when he said it. 

One thing had perplexed me very much in going from bed to 
bed. A very significant and cruel thing. I could find no young 
man but one. He had attracted my notice, by having got up and 
dressed himself in his soldier's jacket and trousers, with the intention 
of sitting by the fire ; but he had found himself too weak, and had 
crept back to his bed and laid himself down on the outside of it. 
I could have pronounced him, alone, to be a young man aged by 
famine and sickness. As we were standing by the Irish soldier's 
bed, I mentioned my perplexity to the Doctor. He took a board 
with an inscription on it from the head of the Irishman's bed, and 
asked me what age I supposed that man to be ? I had observed 
him with attention while talking to him, and answered, confidently, 
"Fifty." The Doctor, with a pitying glance at the. patient, who 
had dropped into a stupor again, put the board back, and said, 
" Twenty-four." 



68 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

All the arrangements of the wards were excellent. They could 
not have been more humane, sympathising, gentle, attentive, or 
wholesome. The owners of the ship, too, had done all they could, 
liberally. There were bright fires in every room, and the convales- 
cent men were sitting round them, reading various papers and peri- 
odicals. I took the liberty of inviting my official friend Pangloss to 
look at those convalescent men, and to tell me whether their faces 
and bearing were or were not, generally, the faces and bearing of 
steady respectable soldiers ? The master of the workhouse, overhear- 
ing me, said he had had a pretty large experience of troops, and that 
better conducted men than these, he had never had to do with. 
They were always (he added) as we saw them. And of us visitors 
(I add) they knew nothing whatever, except that we were there. 

It was audacious in me, but I took another liberty with Pan- 
gloss. Prefacing it with the observation that, of course, I knew 
beforehand that there was not the faintest desire, anywhere, to 
hush up any part of this dreadful business, and that the Inquest 
was the fairest of all possible Inquests, I besought four things of 
Pangloss. Firstly, to observe that the Inquest vjas not held in 
that place, but at some distance off. Secondly, to look round upon 
those helpless spectres in their beds. Thirdly, to remember that 
the witnesses produced from among them before that Inquest, could 
not have been selected because they were the men who had the 
most to tell it, but because they happened to be in a state admit- 
ting of their safe removal. Fourthly, to say whether the coroner 
and Jury could have come there, to those pillows, and taken a 
little evidence ? My official friend declined to commit himself to 
a reply. 

There was a sergeant, reading, in one of the fireside groups. As 
he was a man of very intelligent countenance, and as I have a great 
respect for non-commissioned officers as a class, I sat down on the 
nearest bed, to have some talk with him. (It was the bed of one 
of the grisliest of the poor skeletons, and he died soon afterwards.) 

" I was glad to see, in the evidence of an officer at the Inquest, 
sergeant, that he never saw men behave better on board ship than 
these men." 

"They did behave very well, sir." 

"I was glad to see, too, that every man had a hammock." 

The sergeant gravely shook his head. " There must be some 
mistake, sir. The men of my own mess had no hammocks. There 
were not hammocks enough on board, and the men of the two next 
messes laid hold of hammocks for themselves as soon as they got 
on board, and squeezed my men out, as I may say." 

" Had the squeezed-out men none then?" 



THE UNGOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 69 

" None, sir. As men died, their hammocks were used by other 
men, who wanted hammocks ; but many men had none at all." 

" Then you don't agree with the evidence on that point 1 " 

" Certainly not, sir. A man can't, when he knows to the con- 
trary." 

" Did any of the men sell their bedding for drink ? " 

" There is some mistake on that point too, sir. Men were under 
the impression — I knew it for a fact at the time — that it was 
not allowed to take blankets or bedding on board, and so men who 
had things of that sort came to sell them purposely." 

" Did any of the men sell their clothes for drink ? " 

" They did, sir." (I believe there never was a more truthful wit- 
ness than the sergeant. He had no inclination to make out a case.) 

"Many?" 

"Some, sir" (considering the question). "Soldier-like. They 
had been long marching in the rainy season, by bad roads — no 
roads at all, in short — and when they got to Calcutta, men turned 
to and drank, before taking a last look at it. Soldier-like." 

"Do you see any men in this ward, for example, who sold clothes 
for drink at that time ? " 

The sergeant's wan eye, happily just beginning to rekindle with 
health, travelled round the place and came back to me. " Certainly, 
sir." 

" The marching to Calcutta in the rainy season must have been 
severe ? " 

"It was very severe, sir." 

" Yet what with the rest and the sea air, I should have thought 
that the men (even the men who got drunk) would have soon begun 
to recover on board ship 1 " 

" So they might ; but the bad food told upon them, and when 
we got into a cold latitude, it began to tell more, and the men 
dropped." 

" The sick had a general disinclination for food, I am told, 
sergeant ? " 

" Have you seen the food, sir 1 " 

" Some of it." 

" Have you seen the state of their mouths, sir 1 " 

If the sergeant, who was a man of a few orderly words, had 
spoken the amount of this volume, he could not have settled that 
question better. I believe the sick could as soon have eaten the 
ship, as the ship's provisions. 

I took the additional liberty with my friend Pangloss, when I 
had left the sergeant with good wishes, of asking Pangloss whether 
he had ever heard of biscuit getting drunk and bartering its nutri- 



70 THE UNCOMMEECIAL TRAVELLER. 

tious qualities for putrefaction and vermin ; of peas becoming hard- 
ened in liquor ; of hammocks drinking themselves off the face of 
the earth ; of lime-juice, vegetables, vinegar, cooking accommoda- 
tion, water supply, and beer, all taking to drinking together and 
going to ruin 1 " If not (I asked him), what did he say in defence 
of the officers condemned by the Coroner's Jury, who, by signing 
the General Inspection report relative to the ship Great Tasmania, 
chartered for these troops, had deliberately asserted all that bad and 
poisonous dunghill refuse, to be good and wholesome food 1 " My 
official friend replied that it was a remarkable fact, that whereas some 
officers were only positively good, and other officers only compara- 
tively better, those particular officers were superlatively the very 
best of all possible officers. 

My hand and my heart fail me, in writing my record of this 
journey. The spectacle of the soldiers in the hospital-beds of that 
Liverpool workhouse (a very good workhouse, indeed, be it under- 
stood), was so shocking and so shameful, that as an Englishman I 
blush to remember it. It would have been simply unbearable at 
the time, but for the consideration and pity with which they were 
soothed in their sufferings. 

No punishment that our inefficient laws provide, is worthy of 
the name when set against the guilt of this transaction. But, if 
the memory of it die out unavenged, and if it do not result in the 
inexorable dismissal and disgrace of those who are responsible for 
it, their escape will be infamous to the Government (no matter of 
what party) that so neglects its duty, and infamous to the nation 
that tamely suffers such intolerable wrong to be done in its name. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 3, J^o. 54, Mmj 5, 1860. 
IX. 

CITY OF LONDON CHURCHES. 

If the confession that I have often travelled from this Covent 
Garden lodging of mine on Sundays, should give offence to those 
who never travel on Sundays, they will be satisfied (I hope) by my 
adding that the journeys in question were made to churches. 

Not that I have any curiosity to hear powerful preachers. Time 
was, when I was dragged by the hair of my head, as one may say, 
to hear too many. On summer evenings, when every flower, and 
tree, and bird, might have better addressed my soft young heart, I 
have in my day been caught in the palm of a female hand by the 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 71 

crown, have been violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of 
the hair as a purification for the Temple, and have then been carried 
off highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a 
potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler 
and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was quite 
steamed out of me. In which pitiable plight I have been haled 
out of the place of meeting, at the conclusion of the exercises, and 
catechised respecting Boanerges Boiler, his fifthly, his sixthly, and 
his seventhly, until I have regarded that reverend person in the 
light of a most dismal and oppressive Charade. Time was, when 
I was carried off to platform assemblages at which no human child, 
whether of wrath or grace, could possibly keep its eyes open, and 
when I felt the fatal sleep stealing, stealing over me, and when I 
gradually heard the orator in possession, spinning and humming like a 
great top, until he rolled, collapsed, and tumbled over, and I discov- 
ered to my burning shame and fear, that as to that last stage it was not 
he, but I. I have sat under Boanerges when he has specifically 
addressed himself to us — us, the infants — and at this present 
writing I hear his lumbering jocularity (which never amused us, 
though we basely pretended that it did), and I behold his big 
round face, and I look up the inside of his outstretched coat-sleeve 
as if it were a telescope with the stopper on, and I hate him with 
an unwholesome hatred for two hours. Through such means did 
it come to pass that I knew the powerful preacher from beginning 
to end, all over and all through, while I was very young, and that 
I left him behind at an early period of life. Peace be with him ! 
More peace than he brought to me ! 

Now, I have heard many preachers since that time — not power- 
ful; merely Christian, unaffected, and reverential — and I have 
had many such preachers on my roll of friends. But, it was not to 
hear these, any more than the powerful class, that I made my Sun- 
day journeys. They were journeys of curiosity to the numerous 
churches in the City of London. It came into my head one day, 
here had I been cultivating a familiarity with all the churches oJP 
Rome, and I knew nothing of the insides of the old churches of Lon- 
don ! This befell on a Sunday morning. I began my expeditions 
that very same day, and they lasted me a year. 

I never wanted to know the names of the churches to which I 
went, and to this hour I am profoundly ignorant in that particular 
of at least nine-tenths of them. Indeed, saving that I know the 
church of old Gower's tomb (he lies in efiigy with his head upon 
his books) to be the church of Saint Saviour's, Southwark ; and 
the church of Milton's tomb to be the church of Cripplegate; 
and the church on Cornhill with the great golden keys to be the 



72 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

church of Saint Peter ; I doubt if I could pass a competitive exam- 
ination in any of the names. No question did I ever ask of living 
creature concerning these churches, and no answer to any antiqua- 
rian question on the subject that I ever put to books, shall harass 
the reader's soul. A full half of my pleasure in them arose out 
of their mystery ; mysterious I found them ; mysterious they shall 
remain for me. 

Where shall I begin my round of hidden and forgotten old 
churches in the City of London ? 

It is twenty minutes short of eleven on a Sunday morning, when 
I stroll down one of the many narrow hilly streets in the City that 
tend due south to the Thames. It is my first experiment, and I 
have come to the region of Whittington in an omnibus, and we 
have put down a fierce-eyed spare old woman, whose slate-coloured 
gown smells of herbs, and who walked up Aldersgate-street to 
some chapel where she comforts herself with brimstone doctrine, I 
warrant. We have also put down a stouter and sweeter old lady, 
with a pretty large prayer-book in an unfolded pocket-handkerchief, 
who got out at a corner of a court near Stationers' Hall, and who 
I think must go to church there, because she is the widow of some 
deceased old Company's Beadle. The rest of our freight were 
mere chance pleasure-seekers and rural walkers, and went on to 
the Blackwall railway. So many bells are ringing, when I stand 
undecided at a street corner, that every sheep in the ecclesiastical 
fold might be a bell-wether. The discordance is fearful. My state 
of indecision is referable to, and about equally divisible among, 
four great churches, which are all within sight and sound, all 
within the space of a few square yards. 

As I stand at the street corner, I don't see as many as four 
people at once going to church, though I see as many as four 
churches with their steeples clamouring for people. I choose my 
church, and go up the flight of steps to the great entrance in the 
tower. A mouldy tower within, and like a neglected washhouse. 
A rope comes through the beamed roof, and a man in the corner 
pulls it and clashes the bell — a whity-brown man, whose clothes 
were once black — a man with flue on him, and cobweb. He 
stares at me, wondering how I come there, and I stare at him, won- 
dering how he comes there. Through a screen of wood and glass, 
I peep into the dim church. About twenty people are discernible, 
waiting to begin. Christening would seem to have faded out of 
this church long ago, for the font has the dust of desuetude thick 
upon it, and its wooden cover (shaped like an old-fashioned tureen- 
cover) looks as if it wouldn't come ofl", upon requirement. I 
perceive the altar to be rickety and the Commandments damp. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 73 

Entering after this survey, I jostle the clergyman in his canonicals, 
who is entering too from a dark lane behind a pew of state with 
curtains, where nobody sits. The pew is ornamented with four 
blue wands, once carried by four somebodys, I suppose, before 
somebody else, but which there is nobody now to hold or receive 
honour from. I open the door of a family pew, and shut myself in ; 
if I could occupy twenty family pews at once I might have them. 
The clerk, a brisk young man (how does he come here ?), glances at 
me knowingly, as who should say, " You have done it now ; you 
must stop." Organ plays. Organ-loft is in a small gallery across 
the church ; gallery congregation, two girls. I wonder within my- 
self what will happen when we are required to sing. 

There is a pale heap of books in the corner of my pew, and while 
the organ, which is hoarse and sleepy, plays in such fashion that I 
can hear more of the rusty working of the stops than of any music, 
I look at the books, which are mostly bound in faded baize and 
stuff. They belonged in 1754, to the Dowgate family; and who 
were they ? Jane Comport must have married Young Dowgate, 
and come into the family that way ; Young Dowgate was courting 
Jane Comport when he gave her her prayer-book, and recorded the 
presentation in the fly-leaf; if Jane were fond of Young Dowgate, 
why did she die and leave the book here ? Perhaps at the rickety al- 
tar, and before the damp Commandments, she. Comport, had taken 
him, Dowgate, in a flush of youthful hope and joy, and perhaps it 
had not turned out in the long run as great a success as was 
expected ? 

The opening of the service recalls my wandering thoughts. I 
then find, to my astonishment, that I have been, and still am, tak- 
ing a strong kind of invisible snuff, up my nose, into my eyes, and 
down my throat. I wink, sneeze, and cough. The clerk sneezes ; 
the clergyman winks ; the unseen organist sneezes and coughs (and 
probably winks) ; all our little party wink, sneeze, and cough. 
The snuff seems to be made of the decay of matting, wood, cloth, 
stone, iron, earth, and something else. Is the something else, the 
decay of dead citizens in the vaults below ? As sure as Death it 
is ! Not only in the cold damp February day, do we cough and 
sneeze dead citizens, all through the service, but dead citizens have 
got into the very bellows of the organ, and half choked the same. 
We stamp our feet to warm them, and dead citizens arise in heavy 
clouds. Dead citizens stick upon the walls, and lie pulverised on 
the sounding-board ever the clergyman's head, and, when a gust of 
air comes, tumble down upon him. 

In this first experience I was so nauseated by too much snuff, 
made of the Dowgate family, the Comport branch, and other fami- 



74 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

lies and branches, that I gave but little heed to our dull manner 
of ambling through the service ; to the brisk clerk's manner of en- 
couraging us to try a note or two at psalm time ; to the gallery-con- 
gregation's manner of enjoying a shrill duet, without a notion of time 
or tune ; to the whity-brown man's manner of shutting the minister 
into the pulpit, and being very particular with the lock of the door, 
as if he were a dangerous animal. But, I tried again next Sunday, 
and soon accustomed myself to the dead citizens when I found 
that I could not possibly get on without them among the City 
churches. 

Another Sunday. 

After being again rung for by conflicting bells, like a leg of mut- 
ton or a laced hat a hundred years ago, I make selection of a 
church oddly put away in a corner among a number of lanes — a 
smaller church than the last, and an ugly : of about the date of 
Queen Anne. As a congregation, we are fourteen strong: not 
counting an exhausted charity school in a gallery, which has dwin- 
dled away to four boys, and two girls. In the porch, is a benefac- 
tion of loaves of bread, which there would seem to be nobody left 
in the exhausted congregation to claim, and which I saw an 
exhausted beadle, long faded out of uniform, eating with his eyes 
for self and family when I passed in. There is also an exhausted 
clerk in a brown wig, and two or three exhausted doors and 
windows have been bricked up, and the service books are musty, 
and the pulpit cushions are threadbare, and the whole of the church 
furniture is in a very advanced stage of exhaustion. We are three 
old women (habitual), two young lovers (accidental), two trades- 
men, one with a wife and one alone, an aunt and nephew, again 
two girls (these two girls dressed out for church with everything 
about them limp that should be stiff, and vice versa, are an invari- 
able experience), and three sniggering boys. The clergyman is, 
perhaps, the chaplain of a civic company ; he has the moist and 
vinous look, and eke the bulbous boots, of one acquainted with 
'Twenty port, and comet vintages. 

We are so quiet in our dulness that the three sniggering boys, 
who have got away into a corner by the altar-railing, give us a 
start, like crackers, whenever they laugh. And this reminds me 
of my own village church where, during sermon-time on bright 
Sundays when the birds are very musical indeed, farmers' boys pat- 
ter out over the stone pavement, and the clerk steps out from his 
desk after them, and is distinctly heard in the summer repose to 
pursue and punch them in the churchyard, and is seen to return 
with a meditative countenance, making believe that nothing of the 
sort has happened. The aunt and nephew in this City church are 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 75 

much disturbed by the sniggering boys. The nephew is himself a 
boy, and the sniggerers tempt him to secular thoughts of marbles 
and string, by secretly offering such commodities to his distant con- 
templation. This young Saint Anthony for a while resists, but 
presently becomes a backslider, and in dumb show defies the snig- 
gerers to "heave" a marble or two in his direction. Herein he is 
detected by the aunt (a rigorous reduced gentlewoman who has the 
charge of offices), and I perceive that worthy relative to poke him in 
the side, with the corrugated hooked handle of an ancient umbrella. 
The nephew revenges himself for this, by holding his breath and 
terrifying his kinswoman witb the dread belief that he has made 
up his mind to burst. Regardless of whispers and shakes, he 
swells and becomes discoloured, and yet again swells and becomes 
discoloured, until the aunt can bear it no longer, but leads him out, 
with no visible neck, and with his eyes going before him like a 
prawn's. This causes the sniggerers to regard flight as an eligible 
move, and I know which of them will go out first, because of the 
over-devout attention that he suddenly concentrates on the clergy- 
man. In a little while, this hypocrite, with an elaborate demon- 
stration of hushing his footsteps, and with a face generally expressive 
of having until now forgotten a religious appointment elsewhere, is 
gone. Number two gets out in the same way, but rather quicker. 
Number three getting safely to the door, there turns reckless, and 
banging it open, flies forth with a Whoop ! that vibrates to the 
top of the tower above us. 

The clergyman, who is of a prandial presence and a mufiled voice, . 
may be scant of hearing as well as of breath, but he only glances 
up, as having an idea that somebody has said Amen in a wrong 
place, and continues his steady jog-trot, like a farmer's wife going 
to market. He does all he has to do, in the same easy way, and 
gives us a concise sermon, still like the jog-trot of the farmer's wife 
on a level road. Its drowsy cadence soon lulls the three old women 
asleep, and the unmarried tradesman sits looking out at window, 
and the married tradesman sits looking at his wife's bonnet, and 
the lovers sit looking at one another, so superlatively happy, that 
I mind when I, turned of eighteen, went with my Angelica to a 
City church on account of a shower (by this special coincidence 
that it was in Huggin-lane), and when I said to my Angelica, " Let 
the blessed event, Angelica, occur at no altar but this ! " and when 
my Angelica consented that it should occur at no other — which 
it certainly never did, for it never occurred anywhere. And 0, 
Angelica, what has become of you, this present Sunday morning 
when I can't attend to the sermon ; and, more difficult question than ' 
that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your side ! 



76 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

But, we receive the signal to make that unanimous dive which 
surely is a little conventional — like the strange rustlings and 
settlings and clearings of throats and noses, which are never dis- 
pensed with, at certain points of the Church service, and are never 
held to be necessary under any other circumstances. In a minute 
more it is all over, and the organ expresses itself to be as glad of 
it as it can be of anything in its rheumatic state, and in another 
minute we are all of us out of the church, and Whity-brown has 
locked it up. Another minute or little more, and, in the neigh- 
bouring churchyard — not the yard of that church, but of another 
— a churchyard like a great shabby old mignonette box, mth two 
trees in it and one tomb — I meet Whity-brown, in his private 
capacity, fetching a pint of beer for his dinner from the public- 
house in the corner, where the keys of the rotting fire-ladders are 
kept and were never asked for, and where there is a ragged, white- 
seamed, out-at-elbowed bagatelle board on the first floor. 

In one of these City churches, and only in one, I found an indi- 
vidual who might have been claimed as expressly a City personage. 
I remember the church, by the feature that the clergyman couldn't 
get to his own desk without going through the clerk's, or couldn't 
get to the pulpit without going through the reading-desk — I forget 
which, and it is no matter — and by the presence of this personage 
among the exceedingly sparse congregation. I doubt if we were 
a dozen, and we had no exhausted charity school to help us out. 
The personage was dressed in black of square cut, and was stricken 
. in years, and wore a black velvet cap, and cloth shoes. He was 
of a staid, wealthy, and dissatisfied aspect. In his hand, he con- 
ducted to church a mysterious child : a child of the feminine gender. 
The child had a beaver hat, with a stiff" drab plume that surely 
never belonged to any bird of the air. The child was further 
attired in a nankeen frock and spencer, brown boxing-gloves, and 
a veil. It had a blemish, in the nature of currant jelly, on its 
chin ; and was a thirsty child. Insomuch that the personage car- 
ried in his pocket a green bottle, from which, when the first psalm 
was given out, the child was openly refreshed. At all other times 
throughout the service it was motionless, and stood on the seat 
of the large pew, closely fitted into the corner, like a rain-water 
pipe. 

The personage never opened his book, and never looked at the 
clergyman. He never sat down either, but stood with his arms 
leaning on the top of the pew, and his forehead sometimes shaded 
with his right hand, always looking at the church door. It was 
a long church for a church of its size, and he was at the upper end, 
but he always looked at the door. That he was an old bookkeeper, 




A CITY PERSONAGE. 



78 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

or an old trader who had kept his own books, and that he might 
be seen at the Bank of England about Dividend times, no doubt. 
That he had lived in the City all his life and was disdainful of 
other localities, no doubt. Why he looked at the door, I never 
absolutely proved, but it is my belief that he lived in expectation 
of the time when the citizens would come back to live in the City, 
and its ancient glories would be renewed. He appeared to expect 
that this would occur on a Sunday, and that the wanderers would 
first appear, in the deserted churches, penitent and humbled. 
Hence, he looked at the door which they never darkened. Whose 
child the child was, whether the child of a disinherited daughter, 
or some parish orphan whom the personage had adopted, there was 
nothing to lead up to. It never played, or skipped, or smiled. 
Once, the idea occurred to me that it was an automaton, and that 
the personage had made it ; but following the strange couple out 
one Sunday, I heard the personage say to it, " Thirteen thousand 
pounds ; " to which it added in a weak human voice, " Seventeen 
and fourpence." Four Sundays I followed them out, and this is 
all I ever heard or saw them say. One Sunday, I followed them 
home. They lived behind a pump, and the personage opened their 
abode with an exceeding large key. The one solitary inscription 
on their house related to a fire-plug. The house was partly under- 
mined by a deserted and closed gateway ; its windows were blind 
with dirt ; and it stood with its face disconsolately turned to a 
wall. Five great churches and two small ones rang their Sunday 
bells between this house and the church the couple frequented, so 
they must have had some special reason for going a quarter of a 
mile to it. The last time I saw them, was on this wise. I had 
been to explore another church at a distance, and happened to pass 
the church they frequented, at about two of the afternoon when 
that edifice was closed. But, a little side-door, which I had never 
observed before, stood open, and disclosed certain cellarous steps. 
Methought " They are airing the vaults to-day," when the person- 
age and the child silently arrived at the steps, and silently descended. 
Of course, I came to the conclusion that the personage had at last 
despaired of the looked-for return of the penitent citizens, and that 
he and the child went down to get themselves buried. 

In the course of my pilgrimages I came upon one obscure church 
which had broken out in the melodramatic style, and was got up 
with various tawdry decorations, much after the manner of the 
extinct London may-poles. These attractions had induced several 
young priests or deacons in black bibs for waistcoats, and several 
young ladies interested in that holy order (the proportion being, as 
I estimated, seventeen yoimg ladies to a deacon), to come into the 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 79 

City as a new and odd excitement. It was wonderful to see how 
these young people played out their little play in the heart of the 
City, all among themselves, without the deserted City's knowing 
anything about it. It was as if you should take an empty counting- 
house on a Sunday, and act one of the old Mysteries there. They 
had impressed a small school (from what neighbourhood I don't 
know) to assist in the performances, and it was pleasant to notice 
frantic garlands of inscription on the walls, especially addressing 
those poor innocents in characters impossible for them to decipher. 
There was a remarkably agreeable smell of pomatum in this 
congregation. 

But, in other cases, rot and mildew and dead citizens formed the 
uppermost scent, while, infused into it in a dreamy way not at all 
displeasing, was the staple character of the neighbourhood. In the 
churches about Mark-lane, for example, there was a dry whiff of 
wheat ; and I accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of 
an aged hassock in one of them. From Rood-lane to Tower-street, 
and thereabouts, there was often a subtle flavour of wine : some- 
times, of tea. One church near Mincing-lane smelt like a drug- 
gist's drawer. Behind the Monument the service had a flavour of 
damaged oranges, which, a little further down towards the river, 
tempered into herrings, and gradually toned into a cosmopolitan 
blast of fish. In one church, the exact counterpart of the church 
in the Rake's Progress where the hero is being married to the 
horrible old lady, there was no speciality of atmosphere, until the 
organ shook a perfume of hides all over us from some adjacent 
warehouse. 

Be the scent what it would, however, there was no speciality in 
the people. There were never enough of them to represent any 
calling or neighbourhood. They had all gone elsewhere over-night, 
and the few stragglers in the many churches languished there 
inexpressively. 

Among the Uncommercial travels in which I have engaged, this 
year of Sunday travel occupies its own place, apart from all the 
rest. Whether I think of the church where the sails of the oyster- 
boats in the river almost flapped against the windows, or of the 
church where the railroad made the bells hum as the train rushed 
by above the roof, I recall a curious experience. On summer Sun- 
days, in the gentle rain or the bright sunshine — either, deepen- 
ing the idleness of the idle City — I have sat, in that singular 
silence which belongs to resting-places usually astir, in scores of 
buildings at the heart of the world's metropolis, unknown to far 
greater numbers of people speaking the English tongue, than the 
ancient edifices of the Eternal City, or the Pyramids of Egypt. 



80 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

The dark vestries and registries into which I have peeped, and the 
little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have 
left impressions on my memory as distinct and quaint as any it 
has in that way received. In all those dusty registers that the 
worms are eating, there is not a line but made some hearts leap, 
or some tears flow, in their day. Still and dry now, still and dry ! 
and the old tree at the window with no room for its branches, has 
seen them all out. So with the tomb of the old Master of the old 
Company, on which it drips. His son restored it and died, his 
daughter restored it and died, and then he had been remembered 
long enough, and the tree took possession of him, and his name 
cracked out. 

There are few more striking indications of the changes of man- 
ners and customs that two or three hundred years have brought 
about, than these deserted churches. Many of them are handsome 
and costly structures, several of them were designed by Wren, 
many of them arose from the ashes of the great fire, others of 
them outlived the plague and the fire too, to die a slow death in 
these later days. No one can be sure of the coming time ; but it 
is not too much to say of it that it has no sign in its outsetting 
tides, of the reflux to these churches of their congregations and 
uses. They remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie 
beneath them and around them, Monuments of another age. They 
are worth a Sunday-exploration, now and then, for they yet echo, 
not unharmoniously, to the time when the City of London really 
was London; when the 'Prentices and Trained Bands were of 
mark in the state ; when even the Lord Mayor himself was a Real- 
ity — not a Fiction conventionally be-puffed on one day in the 
year by illustrious friends, who no less conventionally laugh at him 
on the remaining three hundred and sixty-four days. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 3, No. 57, May 26, 1860. 
X. 

SHY NEIGHBOURHOODS. 

So much of my travelling is done on foot, that if I cherished 
betting propensities, I should probably be found registered in sport- 
ing newspapers under some such title as the Elastic Novice, chal- 
lenging all eleven stone mankind to competition in walking. My 
last special feat was turning out of bed at two, after a hard day, 
pedestrian and otherwise, and walking thirty miles into the country 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 81 

to breakfast. The road was so lonely in the night, that I fell 
asleep to the monotonous sound of my own feet, doing their regu- 
lar four miles an hour. Mile after mile I walked, without the 
slightest sense of exertion, dozing heavily and dreaming constantly. 
It was only when I made a stumble like a drunken man, or struck 
out into the road to avoid a horseman close upon me on the path 
— who had no existence — that I came to myself and looked about. 
The day broke mistily (it was autumn time), and I could not dis- 
embarrass myself of the idea that I had to climb those heights and 
banks of cloud, and that there was an Alpine Convent somewhere 
behind the sun, where I was going to breakfast. This sleepy 
notion was so much stronger than such substantial objects as vil- 
lages and haystacks, that, after the sun was up and bright, and 
when I was sujfficiently awake to have a sense of pleasure in the 
prospect, I still occasionally caught myself looking about for wooden 
arms to point the right track up the mountain, and wondering there 
was no snow yet. It is a curiosity of broken sleep that I made 
immense quantities of verses on that pedestrian occasion (of course 
I never make any when I am in my right senses), and that I spoke 
a certain language once pretty familiar to me, but which I have 
nearly forgotten from disuse, with fluency. Of both these phe- 
nomena I have such frequent experience in the state between sleep- 
ing and waking, that I sometimes argue with myself that I know 
I cannot be awake, for, if I were, I should not be half so ready. 
The readiness is not imaginary, because I often recall long strings 
of the verses, and many turns of the fluent speech, after I am 
broad awake. 

My walking is of two kinds : one, straight on end to a definite 
goal at a round pace ; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vaga- 
bond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond 
than myself; it is so natural to me, and strong with me, that I 
think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irre- 
claimable tramp. 

One of the pleasantest things I have lately met with, in a vaga- 
bond course of shy metropolitan neighbourhoods and small shops, is 
the fancy of a humble artist, as exemplified in two portraits repre- 
senting Mr. Thomas Sayers, of Great Britain, and Mr. John Hee- 
nan, of the United States of America. These illustrious men are 
highly coloured in fighting trim, and fighting attitude. To suggest 
the pastoral and meditative nature of their peaceful calling, Mr. 
Heenan is represented on emerald sward, with primroses and other 
modest flowers springing up under the heels of his half-boots; 
while Mr. Sayers is impelled to the administration of his favourite 
blow, the Auctioneer, by the silent eloquence of a village church. 



82 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

The humble homes of England, with their domestic virtues and 
honeysuckle porches, urge both heroes to go in and win ; and the 
lark and other singing birds are observable in the upper air, ecstat- 
ically carolling their thanks to Heaven for a fight. On the whole, 
the associations entwined with the pugilistic art by this artist are 
much in the manner of Izaak Walton. 

But, it is with the lower animals of back streets and by- 
ways that my present purpose rests. For human notes we may 
return to such neighbourhoods when leisure and opportunity 
serve. 

Nothing in shy neighbourhoods perplexes my mind more, than 
the bad company birds keep. Foreign birds often get into good 
society, but British birds are inseparable from low associates. 
There is a whole street of them in St. Giles's ; and I always find 
them in poor and immoral neighbourhoods, convenient to the 
public-house and the pawnbroker's. They seem to lead people 
into drinking, and even the man who makes their cages usually 
gets into a chronic state of black eye. Why is this ? Also, they 
will do things for people in short-skirted velveteen coats with bone 
buttons, or in sleeved waistcoats and fur caps, which they cannot 
be persuaded by the respectable orders of society to undertake. In 
a dirty court in Spitalfields, once, I found a goldfinch drawing his 
own water, and drawing as much of it as if he were in a consuming 
fever. That goldfinch lived at a bird-shop, and offered, in writing, 
to barter himself against old clothes, empty bottles, or even kitchen 
stuff. Surely a low thing and a depraved taste in any finch ! I 
bought that goldfinch for money. He was sent home, and hung 
upon a nail over against my table. He lived outside a counterfeit 
dwelling-house, supposed (as I argued) to be a dyer's ; otherwise it 
would have been impossible to account for his perch sticking out 
of the garret window. From the time of his appearance in my 
room, either he left off being thirsty — -which was not in the bond 
— or he could not make up his mind to hear his little bucket drop 
back into his well when he let it go : a shock which in the best of 
times had made him tremble. He drew no water but by stealth and 
under the cloak of night. After an interval of futile and at length 
hopeless expectation, the merchant who had educated him was 
appealed to. The merchant was a bow-legged character, with a 
flat and cushiony nose, like the last new strawberry. He wore a 
fur cap, and shorts, and was of the velveteen race, velveteeny. He 
sent word that he would " look round." He looked round, appeared 
in the doorway of the room, and slightly cocked up his evil eye at 
the goldfinch. Instantly a raging thirst beset that bird ; when it 
was appeased, he still drew several unnecessary buckets of water ; 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 83 

and finally, leaped about his perch and sharpened his bill, as if he 
had been to the nearest wine vaults and got drunk. 

Donkeys again. I know shy neighbourhoods where the Donkey 
goes in at the street door, and appears to live up-stairs, for I have 
examined the back-yard from over the palings, and have been un- 
able to make him out. Gentility, nobility, Royalty, would appeal 
to that donkey in vain to do what he does for a costermonger. 
Feed him with oats at the highest price, put an infant prince and 
princess in a pair of panniers on his back, adjust his delicate trap- 
pings to a nicety, take him to the softest slopes at Windsor, and 
try what pace you can get out of him. Then, starve him, harness 
him anyhow to a truck with a flat tray on it, and see him bowl 
from Whitechapel to Bayswater. There appears to be no particu- 
lar private understanding between birds and donkeys, in a state of 
nature; but in the shy neighbourhood state, you shall see them 
always in the same hands and always developing their very best 
energies for the very worst company. I have known a donkey — 
by sight ; we were not on speaking terms — who lived over on the 
Surrey side of London-bridge, among the fastnesses of Jacob's 
Island and Dockhead. It was the habit of that animal, when his 
services were not in immediate requisition, to go out alone, idling. 
I have met him a mile from his place of residence, loitering about 
the streets ; and the expression of his countenance at such times 
was most degraded. He was attached to the establishment of an 
elderly lady who sold periwinkles, and he used to stand on Satur- 
day nights with a cartful of those delicacies outside a gin-shop, 
pricking up his ears when a customer came to the cart, and too 
evidently deriving satisfaction from the knowledge that they got 
bad measure. His mistress v/as sometimes overtaken by inebriety. 
The last time I ever saw him (about five years ago) he was in cir- 
cumstances of difficulty, caused by this failing. Having been left 
alone with the cart of periwinkles, and forgotten, he went off idling. 
He prowled among his usual low haunts for some time, gratifying 
his depraved tastes, until, not taking the cart into his calculations, 
he endeavoured to turn up a narrow alley, and became greatly in- 
volved. He was taken into custody by the police, and, the Green 
Yard of the district being near at hand, was backed into that place 
of durance. At that crisis, I encountered him ; the stubborn sense 
he evinced of being — not to compromise the expression — a black- 
guard, I never saw exceeded in the human subject. A flaring 
candle in a paper shade, stuck in among his periwinkles, showed 
him, with his ragged harness broken and his cart extensively shat- 
tered, twitching his mouth and shaking his hanging head, a picture 
of disgrace and obduracy. I have seen boys being taken to station- 
houses, who were as like him as his own brother. 



84 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

The dogs of shy neighbourhoods, I observe to avoid play, and to 
be conscious of poverty. They avoid work, too, if they can, of 
course; that is in the nature of all animals. I have the pleasure to 
know a dog in a back street in the neighbourhood of Walworth, 
who has greatly distinguished himself in the minor drama, and who 
takes -his portrait with him when he makes an engagement, for the 
illustration of the play-bill. His portrait (which is not at all like 
him) represents him in the act of dragging to the earth a recreant 
Indian, who is supposed to have tomahawked, or essayed to toma- 
hawk, a British officer. The design is pure poetry, for there is no 
such Indian in the piece, and no such incident. He is a dog of the 
Newfoundland breed, for whose honesty I would be bail to any 
amount ; but whose intellectual qualities in association with dra- 
matic fiction, I cannot rate high. Indeed, he is too honest for the 
profession he has entered. Being at a town in Yorkshire last sum- 
mer, and seeing him posted in the bill of the night, I attended the 
performance. His first scene was eminently successful ; but, as it 
occupied a second in its representation (and five lines in the bill), 
it scarcely aff'orded ground for a cool and deliberate judgment of 
his powers. He had merely to bark, run on, and jump through an 
inn window, after a comic fugitive. The next scene of importance 
to the fable was a little marred in its interest by his * over-anxiety ; 
forasmuch as while his master (a belated soldier in a den of robbers 
on a tempestuous night) was feelingly lamenting the absence of his 
faithful dog, and laying great stress on the fact that he was thirty 
leagues away, the faithful dog was barking furiously in the prompt- 
er's box, and clearly choking himself against his collar. But it 
was in his greatest scene of all, that his honesty got the better of 
him. He had to enter a dense and trackless forest, on the trail of 
the murderer, and there to fly at the murderer when he found 
him resting at the foot of a tree, with his victim bound ready for 
slaughter. It was a hot night, and he came into the forest from 
an altogether unexpected direction, in the sweetest temper, at a 
very deliberate trot, not in the least excited ; trotted to the foot- 
lights with his tongue out ; and there sat down, panting, and ami- 
ably surveying the audience, with his tail beating on the boards, 
like a Dutch clock. Meanwhile the murderer, impatient to receive 
his doom, was audibly calling to him " Co-o-ome here ! " while the 
victim, struggling with his bonds, assailed him with the most in- 
jurious expressions. It happened through these means, that when 
he was in course of time persuaded to trot up and rend the mur- 
derer limb from limb, he made it (for dramatic purposes) a little 
too obvious that he worked out that awful retribution by licking 
butter off his blood-stained hands. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 85 

In a shy street, behind Long-acre two honest dogs live, who 
perform in Punch's shows. I may venture to say that I am on 
terms of intimacy with both, and that I never saw either guilty 
of the falsehood of failing to look down at the man inside the show, 
during the whole performance. The difficulty other dogs have in 
satisfying their minds about these dogs, appears to be never over- 
come by time. The same dogs must encounter them over and over 
again, as they trudge along in their off-minutes behind the legs of 
the show and beside the drum ; but all dogs seem to suspect 
their frills and jackets, and to sniff at them as if they thought 
those articles of personal adornment, an eruption — a something in 
the nature of mange, perhaps. From this Covent-garden win- 
dow of mine I noticed a country dog, only the other day, who 
had come up to Covent-garden Market under a cart, and had 
broken his cord, an end of which he still trailed along with him. 
He loitered about the corners of the four streets commanded by 
my window; and bad London dogs came up, and told him lies 
that he didn't believe ; and worse London dogs came up, and made 
proposals to him to go and steal in the market, which his princi- 
ples rejected ; and the ways of 'the town confused him, and he 
crept aside and lay down in a doorway. He had scarcely got a 
wink of sleep, when up comes Punch with Toby. He was darting 
to Toby for consolation and advice, when he saw the frill, and 
stopped, in the middle of the street, appalled. The show was 
pitched, Toby retired behind the drapery, the audience formed, the 
drum and pipes struck up. My country dog remained immovable, 
intently staring at these strange appearances, until Toby opened 
the drama by appearing on his ledge, and to him entered Punch, 
who put a tobacco-pipe into Toby's mouth. At this spectacle, the 
country dog threw up his head, gave one terrible howl, and fled 
due west. 

We talk of men keeping dogs, but we might often talk more 
expressively of dogs keeping men. I know a bull-dog in a shy 
corner of Hammersmith who keeps a man. He keeps him up a 
yard, and makes him go to public-houses and lay wagers on him, 
and obliges him to lean against posts and look at him, and forces 
him to neglect work for him, and keeps him under rigid coercion. 
I once knew a fancy terrier who kept a gentleman — a gentleman 
who had been brought up at Oxford, too. The dog kept the gentle- 
man entirely for his glorification, and the gentleman never talked 
about anything but the terrier. This, however, was not in a shy 
neighbourhood, and is a digression consequently. 

There are a great many dogs in shy neighbourhoods, who keep 
boys. I have my eye on a mongrel in Somerstown who keeps 



86 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

three boys. He feigns that he can bring down sparrows, and un- 
burrow rats (he can do neither), and he takes the boys out on sport- 
ing pretences into all sorts of suburban fields. He has likewise 
made them believe that he possesses some mysterious knowledge 
of the art of fishing, and they consider themselves incompletely 
equipped for the Hampstead ponds, with a pickle-jar and a wide- 
mouthed bottle, unless he is with them and barking tremendously. 
There is a dog residing in the Borough of Southwark who keeps 
a blind man. He may be seen, most days, in Oxford- street, hal- 
ing the blind man away on expeditions wholly uncontemplated by 
and unintelligible to, the man : wholly of the dog's conception and 
execution. Contrariwise, when the man has projects, the dog will 
sit down in a crowded thoroughfare and meditate. I saw him 
yesterday, wearing the money-tray like an easy collar, instead of 
offering it to the public, taking the man against his will, on the 
invitation of a disreputable cur, apparently to visit a dog at 
Harrow — he was so intent on that direction. The north wall of 
Burlington House Gardens, between the Arcade and the Albany, 
offers a shy spot for appointments among blind men at about two 
or three o'clock in the afternoon. They sit (very uncomfortably) 
on a sloping stone there, and compare notes. Their dogs may 
always be observed at the same time, openly disparaging the men 
they keep, to one another, and settling where they shall respec- 
tively take their men when they begin to move again. At a small 
butcher's, in a shy neighbourhood (there is no reason for suppress- 
ing the name ; it is by Notting-hill, and gives upon the district 
called the Potteries), I know a shaggy black and white dog who 
keeps a drover. He is a dog of an easy disposition, and too fre- 
quently allows this drover to get drunk. On these occasions, it is 
the dog's custom to sit outside the public-house, keeping his eye on 
a few sheep, and thinking. I have seen him with six sheep, plainly 
casting up in his mind how many he began with when he left the 
market, and at what places he has left the rest. I have seen him 
perplexed by not being able to account to himself for certain par- 
ticular sheep. A light has gradually broken on liim, he has remem- 
bered at what butcher's he left them, and in a burst of grave 
satisfaction has caught a fly off his nose, and shown himself much 
relieved. If I could at any time have doubted the fact that it was 
he who kept the drover, and not the drover who kept him, it would 
have been abundantly proved by his way of taking undivided charge 
of the six sheep, when the drover came out besmeared with red 
ochre and beer, and gave him wrong directions, which he calmly 
disregarded. He has taken the sheep entirely into his own hands, 
has merely remarked with respectful firmness, " That instruction 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 87 

would place them under an omnibus ; you had better confine your 
attention to yourself — you will want it all ; " and has driven 
his charge away, with an intelligence of ears and tail, and a knowl- 
edge of business, that has left his lout of a man very, very far 
behind. 

As the dogs of shy neighbourhoods usually betray a slinking con- 
sciousness of being in poor circumstances — for the most part mani- 
fested in an aspect of anxiety, an awkwardness in their play, and 
a misgiving that somebody is going to harness them to something, 
to pick up a living — so the cats of shy neighbourhoods exhibit 
a strong tendency to relapse into barbarism. Not only are they 
made selfishly ferocious by ruminating on the surplus population 
around them, and on the densely crowded state of all the avenues 
to cat's meat ; not only is there a moral and politico-economical 
haggardness in them, traceable to these reflections ; but they evince 
a physical deterioration. Their linen is not clean, and is wretchedly 
got up ; their black turns rusty, like old mourning ; they wear very 
indifferent fur ; and take to the shabbiest cotton velvet, instead of 
silk velvet. I am on terms of recognition with several small streets 
of cats, about the Obelisk in Saint George's Fields, and also in the 
vicinity of Clerkenwell-green, and also in the back settlements of 
Drury-lane. In appearance, they are very like the women among 
whom they live. They seem to turn out of their unwholesome 
beds into the street, without any preparation. They leave their 
young families to stagger about the gutters, unassisted, while they 
frouzily quarrel and swear and scratch and spit, at street corners. 
In particular, I remark that when they are about to increase their 
families (an event of frequent recurrence) the resemblance is strongly 
expressed in a certain dusty dowdiness, down-at-heel self-neglect, 
and general giving up of things. I cannot honestly report that I 
have ever seen a feline matron of this class washing her face when 
in an interesting condition. 

Not to prolong these notes of uncommercial travel among the 
lower animals of shy neighbourhoods, by dwelling at length upon 
the exasperated moodiness of the tom-cats, and their resemblance 
in many respects to a man and a brother, I will come to a close 
with a word on the fowls of the same localities. 

That anything born of an egg and invested with wings, should 
have got to the pass that it hops contentedly down a ladder into a 
cellar, and calls that going home, is a circumstance so amazing as to 
leave one nothing more in this connection to wonder at. Other- 
wise I might wonder at the completeness with which these fowls 
have become separated from all the birds of the air — have taken 
to grovelling in bricks and mortar and mud — have forgotten all 



88 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

about live trees, and make roosting-places of shop-boards, barrows, 
oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I wonder at nothing 
concerning them, and take them as they are. I accept as products 
of Nature and things of course, a reduced Bantam family of my 
acquaintance in the Hackney-road, who are incessantly at the pawn- 
broker's. I cannot say that they enjoy themselves, for they are of 
a melancholy temperament ; but what enjoyment they are capable 
of, they derive from crowding together in the pawnbroker's side- 
entry. Here, they are always to be found in a feeble flutter, as 
if they were newly come down in the world, and were afraid of 
being identified. I know a low fellow, originally of a good fam- 
ily from Dorking, who takes his whole establishment of wives, 
in single file, in at the door of the Jug Department of a disorderly 
tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them among the company's 
legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and so passes his 
life : seldom, in the season, going to bed before two in the morning. 
Over Waterloo-bridge, there is a shabby old speckled couple (they 
belong to the wooden French-bedstead, washing-stand, and towel- 
horsemaking trade), who are always trying to get in at the door of 
a chapel. Whether the old lady, under a delusion reminding one 
of Mrs. Southcott, has an idea of entrusting an egg to that partic- 
ular denomination, or merely understands that she has no business 
in the building and is consequently frantic to enter it, I cannot 
determine ; but she is constantly endeavouring to undermine the 
principal door : while her partner, who is infirm upon his legs, 
walks up and down, encouraging her and defying the Universe. 
But, the family I have been best acquainted with, since the re- 
moval from this trying sphere of a Chinese circle at Brentford, 
reside in the densest part of Bethnal-green. Their abstraction 
from the objects among which they live, or rather their conviction 
that those objects have all come into existence in express subservi- 
ence to fowls, has so enchanted me, that I have made them the 
subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful observation 
of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family consists, I 
have come to the conclusion that their opinions are represented by 
the leading lord and leading lady : the latter, as I judge, an aged 
personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of quill, 
that gives her the appearance of a bundle of oflSce pens. When a 
railway goods van that would crush an elephant comes round the 
corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under 
the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing 
property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind 
it. They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and 
fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 89 

peck at. Peg-tops and hoops they account, I think, as a sort of 
hail ; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew. Gaslight comes quite as natu- 
ral to them as any other light ; and I have more than a suspicion 
that, in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at the 
corner has superseded the sun. I have established it as a certain 
fact, that they always begin to crow when the public-house shutters 
begin to be taken down, and that they salute the potboy, the instant 
he appears to perform that duty, as if he were Phoebus in person. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 3, No. 60, June 16, 1860. 
XI. 



The chance use of the word " Tramp " in my last paper, brought 
that numerous fraternity so vividly before my mind's eye, that I had 
no sooner laid down my pen than a compulsion was upon me to take 
it up again, and make notes of the Tramps whom I perceived on all 
the summer roads in all directions. 

Whenever a tramp sits down to rest by the wayside, he sits with 
his legs in a dry ditch ; and whenever he goes to sleep (which is 
very often indeed), he goes to sleep on his back. Yonder, by the 
high road, glaring white in the bright sunshine, lies, on the dusty 
bit of turf under the bramble-bush that fences the coppice from 
the highway, the tramp of the order savage, fast asleep. He lies 
on the broad of his back, with his face turned up to the sky, and 
one of his ragged arms loosely thrown across his face. His bundle 
(what can be the contents of that mysterious bundle, to make it 
worth his while to carry it about T) is thrown down beside him, 
and the waking woman with him sits with her legs in the ditch, 
and her back to the road. She wears her bonnet rakishly perched 
on the front of her head, to shade her face from the sun in walk- 
ing, and she ties her skirts round her in conventionally tight tramp- 
fashion with a sort of apron. You can seldom catch sight of her, 
resting thus, without seeing her in a despondently defiant manner 
doing something to her hair or her bonnet, and glancing at you 
between her fingers. She does not often go to sleep herself in the 
daytime, but will sit for any length of time beside the man. And 
his slumberous propensities would not seem to be referable to the 
fatigue of carrying the bundle, for she carries it much oftener and 
further than he. When they are afoot, you will mostly find him 
slouching on ahead, in a grufif temper, while she lags heavily behind 



90 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

with the burden. He is given to personally correcting her, too — 
which phase of his character develops itself oftenest, on benches 
outside alehouse doors — and she appears to become strongly at- 
tached to him for these reasons ; it may usually be noticed that 
when the poor creature has a bruised face, she is the most affec- 
tionate. He has no occupation whatever, this order of tramp, and 
has no object whatever in going anywhere. He will sometimes 
call himself a brickmaker, or a sawyer, but only when he takes an 
imaginative flight. He generally represents himself, in a vague 
way, as looking out for a job of work ; but he never did work, he 
never does, and he never will. It is a favourite fiction with him, 
however (as if he were the most industrious character on earth), 
that you never work ; and as he goes past your garden and sees you 
looking at your flowers, you will overhear him growl with a strong 
sense of contrast, " You are a lucky hidle devil, you are ! " 

The slinking tramp is of the same hopeless order, and has the 
same injured conviction on him that you were born to whatever 
you possess, and never did anything to get it : but he is of a less 
audacious disposition. He will stop before your gate, and say to 
his female companion with an air of constitutional humility and 
propitiation — to edify any one who may be within hearing behind 
a blind or a bush — "This is a sweet spot, ain't it? A lovelly spot ! 
And I wonder if they'd give two jDoor footsore travellers like me and 
you, a drop of fresh water out of such a pretty gen-teel crib ? We'd 
take it wery koind on 'em, wouldn't us ? Wery koind, upon my 
word, us would ? " He has a quick sense of a dog in the vicinity, 
and will extend his modestly-injured propitiation to the dog chained 
up in your yard; remarking, as he slinks at tlie yard gate, "Ah ! 
You are a foine breed o' dog, too, and you ain't kep for nothink ! 
I'd take it wery koind o' your master if he'd elp a traveller and his 
woife as envies no gentlefolk their good fortun, wi' a bit o' your 
broken wittles. He'd never know the want of it, nor more would 
you. Don't bark like that, at poor persons as never done you no 
arm ; the poor is downtrodden and broke enough without that ; 
don't ! " He generally heaves a prodigious sigh in moving away, 
and always looks up the lane and down the lane, and up the road 
and down the road, before going on. 

Both of these orders of tramp are of a very robust habit ; let 
the hard-working labourer at whose cottage-door they prowl and 
beg, have the ague never so badly, these tramps are sure to be in 
good health. 

There is another kind of tramp, whom you encounter this bright 
summer day — say, on a road with the sea-breeze making its dust 
lively, and sails of ships in the blue distance beyond the slope of 




"this is a saveet spot, ain't it? a lovelly spot!" 



92 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Down. As you walk enjoyiugly on, you descry in the perspective 
at the bottom of a steep hill up which your way lies, a figure that 
appears to be sitting airily on a gate, whistling in a cheerful and 
disengaged manner. As you approach nearer to it, you observe 
the figure to slide down from the gate, to desist from whistling, to 
uncock its hat, to become tender of foot, to depress its head and 
elevate its shoulders, and to present all the characteristics of pro- 
found despondency. Arriving at the bottom of the hill and coming 
close to the figure, you observe it to be the figure of a shabby 
young man. He is moving painfully forward, in the direction in 
which you are going, and his mind is so preoccupied with his mis- 
fortunes that he is not aware of your approach until you are close 
upon him at the hill-foot. When he is aware of you, you discover 
him to be a remarkably well-behaved young man, and a remarkably 
well-spoken young man. You know him to be well-behaved, by 
his respectful manner of touching his hat : you know him to be 
well-spoken, by his smooth manner of expressing himself. He says 
in a flowing confidential voice, and without punctuation, " I ask 
your pardon sir but if you would excuse the liberty of being so 
addressed upon the public I way by one who is almost reduced to 
rags though it as not always been so and by no fault of his own 
but through ill elth in his family and many unmerited sufferings it 
would be a great obligation sir to know the time." You give the 
well-spoken young man the time. The well-spoken young man, 
keeping well up with you, resumes : "I am aware sir that it is a 
liberty to intrude a further question on a gentleman walking for 
his entertainment but might I make so bold as ask the favour of 
the way to Dover sir and about the distance ? " You inform the 
well-spoken young man that the way to Dover is straight on, and 
the distance some eighteen miles. The well-spoken young man be- 
comes greatly agitated. "In the condition to which I am reduced," 
says he, "I could not ope to reach Dover before dark even if my 
shoes were in a state to take me tliere or my feet were in a state 
to old out over the flinty road and were not on the bare ground of 
which any gentleman has the means to satisfy himself by looking 
Sir may I take the liberty of speaking to you ? " As the well- 
spoken young man keeps so well up with you that you can't pre- 
vent his taking the liberty of speaking to you, he goes on, with 
fluency : "Sir it is not begging that is my intention for I was 
brought up by the best of mothers and begging is not my trade I 
should not know sir how to follow it as a trade if such were my 
shameful wishes for the best of mothers long taught otherwise and 
in the best of omes though now reduced to take the present liberty 
on the Iway Sir my business was the law-stationering and I was 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 93 

favourably known to the Solicitor-General the Attorney-General 
the majority of the Judges and the ole of the legal profession but 
through ill elth in my family and the treachery of a friend for 
whom I became security and he no other than my own wife's 
brother the brother of my own wife I was cast forth with my 
tender partner and three young children not to beg for I will 
sooner die of deprivation but to make my way to the seaport town 
of Dover where I have a relative i in respect not only that will 
assist me but that would trust me with untold gold Sir in appier 
times and hare this calamity fell upon me I made for my amuse- 
ment when I little thought that I should ever need it excepting 
for my air this " — here the well-spoken young man put his hand 
into his breast — " this comb ! Sir I implore you in the name of 
charity to purchase a tortoiseshell comb which is a genuine article 
at any price that your humanity may put upon it and may the 
blessings of a ouseless family awaiting with beating arts the return 
of a husband and a father from Dover upon the cold stone seats of 
London-bridge ever attend you Sir may I take the liberty of speak- 
ing to you I implore you to buy this comb ! " By this time, being 
a reasonably good walker, you will have been too much for the 
well-spoken young man, who will stop short and express his dis- 
gust and his want of breath, in a long expectoration, as you leave 
him behind. 

Towards the end of the same walk, on the same bright summer 
day, at the corner of the next little town or village, you may find 
another kind of tramp, embodied in the persons of a most exem- 
plary couple whose only improvidence appears to have been, that 
they spent the last of their little All on soap. They are a man 
and woman, spotless to behold — John Anderson, with the frost 
on his short smock-frock instead of his "pow," attended by Mrs. 
Anderson. John is over-ostentatious of the frost upon his raiment, 
and wears a curious and, you would say, an almost unnecessary 
demonstration of girdle of white linen wound about his waist — a 
girdle, snowy as Mrs. Anderson's apron. This cleanliness was the 
expiring efibrt of the respectable couple, and nothing then remained 
to Mr. Anderson but to get chalked upon his spade in snow-white 
copy-book characters, hungry ! and to sit down here. Yes ; one 
thing more remained to Mr. Anderson — his character; Monarch s 
could not deprive him of his hard-earned character. Accordingly, 
as you come up with this spectacle of virtue in distress, Mrs. 
Anderson rises, and with a decent curtsey presents for your con- 
sideration a certificate from a Doctor of Divinity, the reverend the 
Vicar of Upper Dodgington, w^ho informs his Christian friends and 
all whom it may concern that the bearers, John Anderson and law- 



94 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

fal wife, are persons to whom you cannot be too liberal. This 
benevolent pastor omitted no work of his hands to fit the good 
couple out, for with half an eye you can recognise his autograph on 
the spade. 

Another class of tramp is a man, the most valuable part of 
whose stock-in-trade is a highly perplexed demeanour. He is got 
up like a countryman, and you will often come upon the poor 
fellow, while he is endeavouring to decipher the inscription on a 
milestone — quite a fruitless endeavour, for he cannot read. He 
asks your pardon, he truly does (he is very slow of speech, this 
tramp, and he looks in a bewildered way all round the prospect 
while he talks to you), but all of us shold do as we wold be done 
by, and he'll take it kind, if you'll put a power man in the right 
road fur to jine his eldest son as has broke his leg bad in the 
masoning, and is in this heere Orspit'l as is wrote down by Squire 
Pouncerby's own hand as wold not tell a lie fur no man. He then 
produces from under his dark frock (being always very slow and 
perplexed) a neat but worn old leathern purse, from which he 
takes a scrap of paper. On this scrap of paper is written, by 
Squire Pouncerby, of The G-rove, "Please to direct the Bearer, a 
poor but very worthy man, to the Sussex County Hospital, near 
Brighton" — a matter of some difficulty at the moment, seeing 
that the request comes suddenly upon you in the depths of Hert- 
fordshire. The more you endeavour to indicate where Brighton is 
— when you have with the greatest difficulty remembered — the 
less the devoted father can be made to comprehend, and the more 
obtusely he stares at the prospect; whereby, being reduced to 
extremity, you recommend the faithful parent to begin by going 
to St. Albans, and present him with half-a- crown. It does him 
good, no doubt, but scarcely helps him forward, since you find him 
lying drunk that same evening in the wheelwright's sawpit under 
the shed where the felled trees are, opposite the sign of the Three 
Jolly Hedgers. 

But, the most vicious, by far, of all the idle tramps, is the tramp 
who pretends to have been a gentleman. "Educated," he writes, 
from the village beer-shop in pale ink of a ferruginous complexion ; 
" educated at Trin. Coll. Cam, — nursed in the lap of affluence — 
once in my small way the pattron of the Muses," &c. &c. &c. — 
surely a sympathetic mind will not withhold a trifle, to help him 
on to the market-town where he thinks of giving a Lecture to the 
fruges consumere nati, on things in general ? This shameful creat- 
ure lolling about hedge tap-rooms in his ragged clothes, now so far 
from being black that they look as if they never can have been 
black, is more selfish and insolent than even the savage tramp. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 95 

He would sponge on the poorest boy for a farthing, and spurn him 
when he had got it ; he would interpose (if he could get anything 
by it) between the baby and the mother's breast. So much lower 
than the company he keeps, for his maudlin assumption of being 
higher, this pitiless rascal blights the summer road as he maunders 
on between the luxuriant hedges : where (to my thinking) even 
the wild convolvulus and rose and sweetbriar, are the worse for his 
going by, and need time to recover from the taint of him in the air. 

The young fellows who trudge along barefoot, five or six together, 
their boots slung over their shoulders, their shabby bundles under 
their arms, their sticks newly cut from some roadside wood, are not 
eminently prepossessing, but are much less objectionable. There is 
a tramp-fellowship among them. They pick one another up at rest- 
ing stations, and go on in companies. They always go at a fast swing 
— though they generally limp too — and there is invariably one of 
the company who has much ado to keep up with the rest. They 
generally talk about horses, and any other means of locomotion than 
walking : or, one of the company relates some recent experiences 
of the road — which are always disputes and difficulties. As for 
example. "So as I'm a standing at the pump in the market, 
blest if there don't come up a Beadle, and he ses, ' Mustn't stand 
here,' he ses. 'Why not?' I ses. 'No beggars allowed in this 
town,' he ses. 'Who's a beggar?' I ses. 'You are,' he ses. 
' Who ever see me beg ? Did you ? ' I ses. ' Then you're a tramp,' 
he ses. 'I'd rather be that than a Beadle,' I ses." (The company 
express great approval.) "'Would you,' he ses to me. 'Yes I 
would,' I ses to him. ' Well,' he ses, ' anyhow, get out of this town.' 
' Why, blow your little town ! ' I ses, ' who wants to be in it ? 
Wot does your dirty little town mean by comin' and stickin' itself 
in the road to any^^here ? Why don't you get a shovel and a barrer, 
and clear your town out o' people's way ? ' " (The company express- 
ing the highest approval and laughing aloud, they all go down the 
hill.) 

Then, there are the tramp handicraft men. Are they not all 
over England, in this Midsummer time 1 Where does the lark sing, 
the corn grow, the mill turn, the river run, and they are not among 
the lights and shadows, tinkering, chair-mending, umbrella-mending, 
clock-mending, knife-grinding 1 Surely, a pleasant thing, if we were 
in that condition of life, to grind our way through Kent, Sussex, 
and Surrey. For the worst six weeks or so, we should see the 
sparks we ground off, fiery bright against a background of green 
wheat and green leaves. A little later, and the ripe harvest would 
pale our sparks from red to yellow, until we got the dark newly- 
turned land for a background again, and they were red once more. 



96 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

By that time, we should have ground our way to the sea cliffs, and 
the whirr of our wheel would be lost in the breaking of the waves. 
Our next variety m sparks would be derived from contrast with the 
gorgeous medley of colours in the autumn woods, and, by the time 
we had ground our way round to the healthy lands between Reigate 
and Croydon, doing a prosperous stroke of business all along, we 
should show like a little firework in the light frosty air, and be the 
next best thing to the blacksmith's forge. Very agreeable, too, to 
go on a chair-mending tour. What judges we should be of rushes, 
and how knowingly (with a sheaf and a bottomless chair at our 
back) we should lounge on bridges, looking over at osier-beds. 
Among all the innumerable occupations that cannot possibly be 
transacted without the assistance of lookers on, chair-mending may 
take a station in the first rank. When we sat down with our backs 
against the barn or the public-house, and began to mend, what a 
sense of popularity would grow upon us. When all the children 
came to look at us, and the tailor, and the general dealer, and the 
farmer who had been giving a small order at the little saddler's, and 
the groom from the great house, and the publican, and even the 
two skittle-players (and here note that, howsoever busy all the rest 
of village human-kind may be, there will always be two people 
with leisure to play at skittles, wherever village skittles are), what 
encouragement would be on us to plait and weave ! No one looks 
at us while we plait and weave these words. Clock-mending again. 
Except for the slight inconvenience of carrying a clock under our 
arm, and the monotony of making the bell go, whenever we came 
to a human habitation, what a pleasant privilege to give a voice to 
the dumb cottage-clock, and set it talking to the cottage family 
again. Likewise we foresee great interest is going round by the 
park plantations, under the overhanging boughs (hares, rabbits, par- 
tridges, and pheasants, scudding like mad across and across the 
chequered ground before us), and so over the park ladder, and 
through the wood, until we came to the Keeper's lodge. Then, 
would the Keeper be discoverable at his door, in a deep nest of 
leaves, smoking his pipe. Then, on our accosting him in the way 
of our trade, would he call to Mrs. Keeper, respecting "t'ould 
clock " in the kitchen. Then, would Mrs. Keeper ask us into the 
lodge, and on due examination we should offer to make a good job 
of it for eighteenpence ; which offer, being accepted, would set us 
tinkling and clinking among the chubby awe-struck little Keepers 
for an hour and more. So completely to the family's satisfaction 
would we achieve our work, that the Keeper would mention how 
that there was something wrong with the bell of the turret stable- 
clock up at the Hall, and that if we thought good of going up to the 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 97 

housekeeper on the chance of that job too, why he would take us. 
Then, should we go, among the branching oaks and the deep fern, 
by silent ways of mystery known to the Keeper, seeing the herd 
glancing here and there as we went along, until we came to the 
old Hall, solemn and grand. Under the Terrace Flower Garden, 
and round by the stables, would the Keeper take us in, and as we 
passed we should observe how spacious and stately the stables, and 
how fine the painting of the horses' names over their stalls, and 
how solitary all : the family being in London. Then, should we 
find ourselves presented to the housekeeper, sitting, in hushed 
state, at needlework, in a bay-window looking out upon a mighty 
grim red-brick quadrangle, guarded by stone lions disrespectfully 
throwing somersaults over the escutcheons of the noble family. 
Then, our services accepted and we insinuated with a candle into 
the stable-turret, we should find it to be a mere question of pendu- 
lum, but one that would hold us until dark. Then, should we fall 
to work, with a general impression of Ghosts being about, and of 
pictures indoors that of a certainty came out of their frames and 
"walked," if the family would only own it. Then, should we 
work and work, until the day gradually turned to dusk, and even 
until the dusk gradually turned to dark. Our task at length ac- 
complished, we should be taken into an enormous servants' hall, 
and there regaled with beef and bread, and powerful ale. Then, 
paid freely, we should be at liberty to go, and should be told by a 
pointing helper to keep round over yinder by the blasted ash, and 
so straight through the woods, till we should see the town-lights 
right afore us. Then, feeling lonesome, should we desire upon the 
whole, that the ash had not been blasted, or that the helper had 
had the manners not, to mention it. However, we should keep on, 
all right, till suddenly the stable bell would strike ten in the dole- 
fullest way, quite chilling our blood, though we had so lately taught 
him how to acquit himself. Then, as we went on, should we recall 
old stories, and dimly consider what it would be most advisable to 
do, in the event of a tall figure, all in white, with saucer eyes, 
coming up and saying, " I want you to come to a churchyard and 
mend a church clock. Follow me ! " Then, should we make a 
burst to get clear of the trees, and should soon find ourselves in 
the open, with the town-lights bright ahead of us. So should we 
lie that night at the ancient sign of the Crispin and Crispanus, and 
rise early next morning to be betimes on tramp again. 

Bricklayers often tramp, in twos and threes, lying by night at 
their "lodges," which are scattered all over the country. Bricklay- 
ing is another of the occupations that can by no means be transacted 
in rural parts, without the assistance of spectators — of as many as 



98 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

can be convened. In thinly-peopled spots, I have known bricklay- 
ers on tramp, coming up with bricklayers at work, to be so sensible 
of the indispensability of lookers-on, that they themselves have set 
up in that capacity, and have been unable to subside into the ac- 
ceptance of a proffered share in the jobj for two or three days 
together. Sometimes, the "navvy," on tramp, with an extra pair 
of half-boots over his shoulder, a bag, a bottle, and a can, will take 
a similar part in a job of excavation, and will look at it without 
engaging in it, until all his money is gone. The current of my un- 
commercial pursuits caused me only last summer to want a little 
body of workmen for a certain spell of work in a pleasant part of 
the country ; and I was at one time honoured with the attendance 
of as many as seven-and-twenty, who were looking at six. 

Who can be familiar with any rustic highway in summer-time, 
without storing up knowledge of the many tramps who go from one 
oasis of town or village to another, to sell a stock in trade, appar- 
ently not worth a shilling when sold? Shrimps are a favourite 
commodity for this kind of speculation, and so are cakes of a soft 
and spongy character, coupled with Spanish nuts and brandy balls. 
The stock is carried on the head in a basket, and, between the head 
and the basket, are the trestles on which the stock is displayed at 
trading times. Fleet of foot, but a careworn class of tramp this, 
mostly ; with a certain stiffness of neck, occasioned by much anxious 
balancing of baskets ; and also with a long Chinese sort of eye, 
which an overweighted forehead would seem to have squeezed into 
that form. 

On the hot dusty roads near seaport towns and great rivers, 
behold the tramping Soldier. And if you should happen never to 
have asked yourself whether his uniform is suited to his work, per- 
haps the poor fellow's appearance as he comes distressfully towards 
you, with his absurdly tight jacket unbuttoned, his neck-gear in his 
hand, and his legs well chafed by his trousers of baize, may suggest 
the personal inquiry, how you think you would like it. Much bet- 
ter the tramping Sailor, although his cloth is somewhat too thick 
for land service. But, why the tramping merchant-mate should 
put on a black velvet waistcoat, for a chalky country in the dog- 
days, is one of the great secrets of nature that will never be 
discovered. 

I have my eye upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either 
side by a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust 
and the trees, a skirting patch of grass. AVild flowers grow in 
abundance on this spot, and it lies high and airy, with a distant 
river stealing steadily away to the ocean, like a man's life. To gain 
the milestone here, which the moss, primroses, violets, blue-bells. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 99 

and wild roses, would soon render illegible but for peering travel- 
lers pushing them aside with their sticks, you must come up a steep 
hill, come which way you may. So, all the tramps with carts or 
caravans — the Gipsy-tramp, the Show-tramp, the Cheap Jack — 
find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place, and all 
turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot. 
Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have 
scorched its grass ! What tramp children do I see here, attired in 
a handful of rags, making a gymnasium of the shafts of the cart, 
making a feather-bed of the flints and brambles, making a toy of 
the hobbled old horse who is not much more like a horse than any 
cheap toy would be ! Here, do I encounter the cart of mats and 
brooms and baskets — with all thoughts of business given to the 
evening wind — with the stew made and being served out — with 
Cheap Jack and Dear Jill striking soft music out of the plates that 
are rattled like warlike cymbals when put up for auction at fairs 
and markets — their minds so influenced (no doubt) by the melody 
of the nightingales as they begin to sing in the woods behind them, 
that if I were to propose to deal, they would sell me anything at 
cost price. On this hallowed ground has it been my happy privi- 
lege (let me whisper it), to behold the White-haired Lady with the 
pink eyes, eating meat-pie with the Giant : while, by the hedge- 
side, on the box of blankets which I knew contained the snakes, 
were set forth the cups and saucers and the teapot. It was on an 
evening in August, that I chanced upon this ravishing spectacle, 
and I noticed that, whereas the Giant reclined half concealed 
beneath the overhanging boughs and seemed indiff'erent to Nature, 
the white hair of the gracious Lady streamed free in the breath of 
evening, and her pink eyes found pleasure in the landscape. I 
heard only a single sentence of her uttering, yet it bespoke a talent 
for modest repartee. The ill-mannered Giant — accursed be his 
evil race ! — had interrupted the Lady in some remark, and, as I 
passed that enchanted comer of the wood, she gently reproved him, 
with the words, " Now, Cobby ; " — Cobby ! so short a name ! — 
"ain't one fool enough to talk at a time?" 

Within appropriate distance of this magic ground, though not so 
near it as that the song trolled from tap or bench at door, can 
invade its woodland silence, is a little hostelry which no man pos- 
sessed of a penny was ever known to pass in warm weather. 
Before its entrance, are certain pleasant trimmed limes ; likewise, a 
cool well, with so musical a bucket-handle that its fall upon the bucket 
rim will make a horse prick up his ears and neigh, upon the 
droughty road half a mile off". This is a house of great resort for 
haymaking tramps and harvest tramps, insomuch that they sit 



100 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

within, drinking their mugs of beer, their relinquished scythes and 
reaping-hooks glare out of the open windows, as if the whole 
establishment were a family war-coach of Ancient Britons, Later 
in the season, the whole country-side, for miles and miles, will 
swarm with hopping tramps. They come in families, men, women, 
and children, every family provided with a bundle of bedding, an 
iron pot, a number of babies, and too often with some poor sick 
creature quite unfit for the rough life, for whom they suppose the 
smell of the fresh hop to be a sovereign remedy. Many of these 
hoppers are Irish, but many come from London. They crowd all 
the roads, and camp under all the hedges and on all the scraps of 
common-land, and live among and upon the hops until they are all 
picked and the hop gardens, so beautiful through the summer, look 
as if they had been laid waste by an invading army. Then, there 
is a vast exodus of tramps out of the county ; and if you ride or 
drive round any turn of any road, at more than a foot pace, you 
will be bewildered to find that you have charged into the bosom of 
fifty families, and that there are splashing up all around you, in the 
utmost prodigality of confusion, bundles of bedding, babies, iron pots, 
and a good-humoured multitude of both sexes and all ages, equally 
divided between perspiration and intoxication. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 3, No. 62, June 30, 1860. 
XII. 

DULLBOROUGH TOWN. 

It lately happened that I found myself rambling about the 
scenes among which my earliest days were passed ; scenes from 
which I departed when I was a child, and which I did not revisit 
until I was a man. This is no uncommon chance, but one that 
befalls some of us any day; perhaps it may not be quite unin- 
teresting to compare notes with the reader respecting an experience 
so familiar and a journey so uncommercial. 

I call my boyhood's home (and I feel like a Tenor in an English 
Opera when I mention it) Dullborough. Most of us come from 
Dullborough who come from a country town. 

As I left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads 
in the land, I left it in a stage-coach. Through all the years that 
have since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in 
which I was packed — like game — - and forwarded, carriage paid, 
to the Cross Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London 1 There was 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 101 

no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in soli- 
tude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought 
life sloppier than I had expected to find it. 

With this tender remembrance upon me, I was cavalierly shunted 
back into DuUborough the other day, by train. My ticket had 
been previously collected, like my taxes, and my shining new port- 
manteau had had a great plaster stuck upon it, and I had been 
defied by Act of Parliament to offer an objection to anything that 
was done to it, or me, under a penalty of not less than forty 
shillings or more than five pounds, compoundable for a term of 
imprisonment. When I had sent my disfigured property on to 
the hotel, I began to look about me; and the first discovery I 
made, was, that the Station had swallowed up the playing-field. 

It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn-trees, the hedge, the 
turf, and all those buttercups and daisies, had given place to the 
stoniest of jolting roads : while, beyond the Station, an ugly dark 
monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open, as if it had swallowed 
them and were ravenous for more destruction. The coach that 
had carried me away, was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-Eyed 
Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street ; the 
locomotive engine that had brought me back, was called severely 
No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R., and was spitting ashes and hot- 
water over the blighted ground. 

When I had been let out of the platform-door, like a prisoner 
whom his turnkey grudgingly released, I looked in again over the 
low wall, at the scene of departed glories. Here, in the haymak- 
ing time, had I been delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, 
an immense pile (of haycock), by my countrymen, the victorious 
British (boy next door and his two cOusins), and had been recog- 
nised with ecstasy by my affianced one (Miss Green), who had 
come all the way from England (second house in the terrace) to 
ransom me, and marry me. Here, had I first heard in confidence, 
from one whose father was greatly connected, being under Govern- 
ment, of the existence of a terrible banditti, called "The Radicals," 
whose principles were, that the Prince Regent wore stays, and that 
nobody had a right to any salary, and that the army and navy 
ought to be put down — horrors at which I trembled in my bed, 
after supplicating that the Radicals might be speedily taken and 
hanged. Here, too, had we, the small boys of Boles's, had that 
cricket match against the small boys of Coles's, when Boles and 
Coles had actually met upon the ground, and when, instead of in- 
stantly hitting out at one another with the utmost fury, as we had 
all hoped and expected, those sneaks had said respectively, " I hope 
Mrs. Boles is well," and " I hope Mrs. Coles and the baby are doing 



102 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

charmingly." Could it be that, after all this, and much more, 
the Playing-field was a Station, and No. 97 expectorated boiling- 
water and redhot cinders on it, and the whole belonged by Act of 
Parliament to S.E.R. ? 

As it could be, and was, I left the place with a heavy heart for 
a walk all over the town. And first of Timpson's up-street. When 
I departed from DuUborough in the strawy arms of Timpson's Blue- 
Eyed Maid, Timpson's was a moderate-sized coach-office (in fact, a 
little coach-office), with an oval transparency in the window, which 
looked beautiful by night, representing one of Timpson's coaches in 
the act of passing a milestone on the London road with great ve- 
locity, completely full inside and out, and all the passengers dressed 
in the first style of fashion, and enjoying themselves tremendously. 
I found no such place as Timpson's now — no such bricks and 
rafters, not to mention the name — no such edifice on the teeming 
earth. Pickford had come and knocked Timpson's down. Pickford 
had not only knocked Timpson's down, but had knocked two or 
three houses down on each side of Timpson's, and then had knocked 
the whole into one great establishment with a pair of big gates, in 
and out of which, his (Pickford's) waggons are, in these days, al- 
ways rattling, with their drivers sitting up so high, that they look 
in at the second-floor windows of the old-fashioned houses in the 
High-street as they shake the town. I have not the honour of 
Pickford's acquaintance, but I felt that he had done me an injury, 
not to say committed an act of boyslaughter, in running over my 
childhood in this rough manner ; and if ever I meet Pickford driv- 
ing one of his own monsters, and smoking a pipe the while (which 
is the custom of his men), he shall know by the expression of my 
eye, if it catches his, that there is something wrong between us. 

Moreover, I felt that Pickford had no right to come rushing 
into DuUborough and deprive the town of a public picture. He is 
not Napoleon Bonaparte. When he took down the transparent 
stage-coach, he ought to have given the town a transparent van. 
With a gloomy conviction that Pickford is wholly utilitarian and 
unimaginative, I proceeded on my way. 

It is a mercy I have not a red and green lamp and a night-bell 
at my door, for in my very young days I was taken to so many 
lyings-in that I wonder I escaped becoming a professional martyr to 
them in after-life. I suppose I had a very sympathetic nurse, 
with a large circle of married acquaintance. However that was, as 
I continued my walk through DuUborough, I found many houses 
to be solely associated in my mind with this particular interest. 
At one little greengrocer's shop, down certain steps from the street, 
I remember to have waited on a lady who had had four children 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 103 

(I am afraid to write five, though I fully believe it was five) at a 
birth. This meritorious woman held quite a reception in her room 
on the morning when I was introduced there, and the sight of the 
house brought vividly to my mind how the four (five) deceased 
young people lay, side by side, on a clean cloth on a chest of 
drawers ; reminding me by a homely association, which I suspect 
their complexion to have assisted, of pigs' feet as they are usually 
displayed at a neat tripe-shop. Hot caudle was handed round on 
the occasion, and I further remembered as I stood contemplating 
the greengrocer's, that a subscription was entered into among the 
company, which became extremely alarming to my consciousness of 
having pocket-money on my person. This fact being known to 
my conductress, whoever she was, I was earnestly exhorted to con- 
tribute, but resolutely declined : therein disgusting the company, 
who gave me to understand that I must dismiss all expectations 
of going to Heaven. 

How does it happen that when all else is change wherever one 
goes, there yet seem, in every place, to be some few people who 
never alter ? As the sight of the greengrocer's house recalled these 
trivial incidents of long ago, the identical greengrocer appeared on 
the steps, with his hands in his pockets, and leaning his shoulder 
against the door-post, as my childish eyes had seen him many a 
time; indeed, there was his old mark on the door-post yet, as 
if his shadow had become a fixture there. It was he himself; 
he might formerly have been an old-looking young man, or he 
might now be a young-looking old man, but there he was. In 
walking along the street, I had as yet looked in vain for a famil- 
iar face, or even a transmitted face ; here was the very greengrocer 
who had been weighing and handling baskets on the morning of 
the reception. As he brought with him a dawning remembrance 
that he had had no proprietary interest in those babies, I crossed 
the road, and accosted him on the subject. He was not in the 
least excited or gratified, or in any way roused, by the accuracy of 
my recollection, but said, Yes, summut out of the common — he 
didn't remember how many it was (as if half-a-dozen babes either 
way made no difference) — had happened to a Mrs. What's-her- 
name, as once lodged there — but he didn't call it to mind, partic- 
ular. Nettled by this phlegmatic conduct, I informed him that I 
had left the town when I was a child. He slowly returned, quite 
unsoftened, and not without a sarcastic kind of complacency, Had 
I ? Ah ! And did I find it had got on tolerably well without me ? 
Such is the difference (I thought, when I had left him a few hun- 
dred yards behind, and was by so much in a better temper) between 
going away from a place and remaining in it. I had no right, I 



104 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

reflected, to be angry with the greengrocer for his want of interest, 
I was nothing to him : whereas he was the town, the cathedral, 
the bridge, the river, my childhood, and a large slice of my life, to 
me. 

Of course the town had shrunk fearfully, since I was a child 
there. I had entertained the impression that the High-street was 
at least as wide as Regent-street, London, or the Italian Boulevard 
at Paris. I found it little better than a lane. There was a public 
clock in it, which I had supposed to be the finest clock in the world : 
whereas it now turned out to be as inexpressive, moon-faced, and 
weak a clock as ever I saw. It belonged to a Town Hall, where 
I had seen an Indian (who I now suppose wasn't an Indian) swal- 
low a sword (which I now suppose he didn't). The edifice had 
appeared to me in those days so glorious a structure, that I had 
set it up in my mind as the model on which the Genie of the Lamp 
built the palace for Aladdin, A mean little brick heap, like a 
demented chapel, with a few yawning persons in leather gaiters, 
and in the last extremity for something to do, lounging at the door 
with their hands in their pockets, and calling themselves a Corn 
Exchange ! 

The Theatre was in existence, I found, on asking the fishmonger, 
who had a compact show of stock in his window, consisting of a 
sole and a quart of shrimps — and I resolved to comfort my mind 
by going to look at it. Richard the Third, in a very uncomfortable 
cloak, had first appeared to me there, and had made my heart leap 
with terror by backing up against the stage-box in which I was 
posted, while struggling for life against the virtuous Richmond. 
It was within those walls that I had learnt as from a page of 
English history, how that wicked King slept in war-time on a sofa 
much too short for him, and how fearfully his conscience troubled 
his boots. There, too, had I first seen the funny countryman, but 
countryman of noble principles, in a flowered waistcoat, crunch up 
his little hat and throw it on the ground, and pull off his coat, 
saying, "Dom thee, squire, coom on with thy fistes then!" At 
which the lovely young woman who kept company with him (and 
who went out gleaning, in a narrow white muslin apron with five 
beautiful bars of five different coloured ribbons across it) was so 
frightened for his sake, that she fainted away. Many wondrous 
secrets of Nature had I come to the knowledge of in that sanctuary : 
of which not the least terrific were, that the witches in Macbeth 
bore an awful resemblance to the Thanes and other proper inhabi- 
tants of Scotland ; and that the good King Duncan couldn't rest 
in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling himself 
somebody else. To the Theatre, therefore, I repaired for consola- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 105 

tion. But I found very little, for it was in a bad and declining 
way. A dealer in wine and bottled beer had already squeezed his 
trade into the box-office, and the theatrical money was taken — 
when it came — in a kind of meat-safe in the passage. The dealer 
in wine and bottled beer must have insinuated himself under the 
stage too ; for he announced that he had various descriptions of 
alcoholic drinks " in the wood," and there was no possible stowage 
for the wood anywhere else. Evidently, he was by degrees eating 
the establishment away to the core, and would soon have sole 
possession of it. It was To Let, and hopelessly so, for its old pur- 
poses ; and there had been no entertainment within its walls for a 
long time except a Panorama ; and even that had been announced 
as " pleasingly instructive," and I know too well the fatal mean- 
ing and the leaden import of those terrible expressions. No, there 
was no comfort in the Theatre. It was mysteriously gone, like my 
own youth. Unlike my own youth, it might be coming back some 
day ; but there was little promise of it. 

As the toAvn was placarded with references to the Dullborough 
Mechanics' Institution, I thought I would go and look at that 
establishment next. There had been no such thing in the town, 
in my young day, and it occurred to me that its extreme prosperity 
might have brought adversity upon the Drama. I found the 
Institution with some difficulty, and should scarcely have known 
that I had found it if I had judged from its external appearance 
only ; but this was attributable to its never having been finished, 
and having no front : consequently, it led a modest and retired 
existence up a stable-yard. It was (as I learnt, on inquiry) a most 
flourishing Institution, and of the highest benefit to the town : two 
triumphs which I was glad to understand were not at all impaired 
by the seeming drawbacks that no mechanics belonged to it, and 
that it was steeped in debt to the chimney-pots. It had a large 
room, which was approached by an infirm step-ladder : the builder 
having declined to construct the intended staircase, without a pres- 
ent payment in cash, which Dullborough (though profoundly appre- 
ciative of the Institution) seemed unaccountably bashful about 
subscribing. The large room had cost — or would, when paid for 
— five hundred pounds ; and it had more mortar in it and more 
echoes, than one might have expected to get for the money. It was 
fitted up with a platform, and the usual lecturing tools, including 
a large black board of a menacing appearance. On referring to lists 
of the courses of lectures that had been given in this thriving Hall, 
I fancied I detected a shyness in admitting that human nature when 
at leisure has any desire whatever to be relieved and diverted; 
and a furtive sliding in of any poor make-weight piece of amuse- 



106 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

ment, shamefacedly and edgewise. Thus, I observed that it was 
necessary for the members to be knocked on the head with Gas, 
Air, Water, Food, the Solar System, the Geological periods. Criti- 
cism on Milton, the Steam-engine, John Bunyan, and Arrow-Headed 
Inscriptions, before they might be tickled by those unaccountable 
choristers, the negro singers in the court costume of the reign of 
George the Second. Likewise, that they must be stunned by a 
weighty inquiry whether there was internal evidence in Shake- 
speare's works, to prove that his uncle by the mother's side lived for 
some years at Stoke Newington, before they were brought-to by a 
Miscellaneous Concert. But, indeed the masking of entertainment, 
and pretending it was something else — as people mask bedsteads 
when they are obliged to have them in sitting-rooms, and make 
believe that they are book-cases, sofas, chests of drawers, anything 
rather than bedsteads — was manifest even in the pretence of 
dreariness that the unfortunate entertainers themselves felt obliged 
in decency to put forth when they came here. One very agreeable 
professional singer who travelled with two professional ladies, knew 
better than to introduce either of those ladies to sing the ballad 
" Comin' through the Rye " without prefacing it himself, with some 
general remarks on wheat and clover; and even then, he dared not 
for his life call the song, a song, but disguised it in the bill as an 
"Illustration." In the library, also — fitted with shelves for three 
thousand books, and containing upwards of one hundred and 
seventy (presented copies mostly), seething their edges in damp 
plaster — there was such a painfully apologetic return of 62 offend- 
ers who had read Travels, Popular Biography, and mere Fiction 
descriptive of the aspirations of the hearts and souls of mere human 
creatures like themselves ; and such an elaborate parade of 2 bright 
examples who had had down Euclid after the day's occupation and 
confinement ; and 3 who had had down Metaphysics after ditto ; 
and 1 who had had down Theology after ditto ; and 4 who had 
worried Grammar, Political Economy, Botany, and Logarithms all 
at once after ditto ; that I suspected the boasted class to be one 
man, who had been hired to do it. 

Emerging from the Mechanics' Institution and continuing my 
walk about the town, I still noticed everywhere the prevalence, to 
an extraordinary degree, of this custom of putting the natural 
demand for amusement out of sight, as some untidy housekeepers 
put dust, and pretending that it was swept away. And yet it was 
ministered to, in a dull and abortive manner, by all who made this 
feint. Looking in at what is called in Dullborough "the serious 
bookseller's," where, in my childhood, I had studied the faces of 
numbers of gentlemen depicted in rostrums with a gaslight on each 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 107 

side of them, and casting my eyes over the open pages of certain 
printed discourses there, I found a vast deal of aiming at jocosity 
and dramatic eflfect, even in them — yes, verily, even on the part 
of one very wrathful expounder who bitterly anathematised a poor 
little Circus. Similarly, in the reading provided for the young 
people enrolled in the Lasso of Love, and other excellent unions, 
I found the writers generally under a distressing sense that they 
must start (at all events) like story-tellers, and delude the young 
persons into the belief that they were going to be interesting. As 
I looked in at this window for twenty minutes by the clock, I am 
in a position to offer a friendly remonstrance — not bearing on this 
particular point — to the designers and engravers of the pictures 
in those publications. Have they considered the awful consequence 
likely to flow from their representations of Virtue 1 Have they asked 
themselves the question, whether the terrific prospect of acquiring 
that fearful chubbiness of head, unwieldiness of arm, feeble disloca- 
tion of leg, crispiness of hair, and enormity of shirt-collar, which 
they represent as inseparable from Goodness, may not tend to con- 
firm sensitive waverers, in Evil ? A most impressive example (if I 
had believed it) of what a Dustman and a Sailor may come to, when 
they mend their ways, was presented to me in this same shop-win- 
dow. When they were leaning (they vrere intimate friends) against 
a post, drunk and reckless, with surpassingly bad hats on, and their 
hair over their foreheads, they were rather picturesque, and looked 
as if they might be agreeable men, if they would not be beasts. But, 
when they had got over their bad propensities, and when, as a con- 
sequence, their heads had swelled alarmingly, their hair had got so 
curly that it lifted theii' blo-^m-out cheeks up, their coat-cuffs were so 
long that they never could do any work, and their eyes were so wide 
open that they never could do any sleep, they presented a spectacle 
calculated to plunge a timid nature into the depths of Infamy. 

But, the clock that had so degenerated since I saw it last, 
admonished me that I had stayed here long enough ; and I resumed 
my walk. 

I had not gone fifty paces along the street when I was suddenly 
brought up by the sight of a man who got out of a little phaeton at 
the doctor's door, and went into the doctor's house. Immediately, 
the air was filled with the scent of trodden grass, and the perspective 
of years opened, and at the end of it was a little likeness of this man 
keeping a mcket, and I said, " God bless my soul ! Joe Specks ! " 

Through many changes and much work, I had preserved a 
tenderness for the memory of Joe, forasmuch as we had made the 
acquaintance of Roderick Random together, and had believed him 
to be no ruffian, but an ingenuous and engaging hero. Scorning 



108 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

to ask the boy left in the phaeton whether it was really Joe, and 
scorning even to read the brass plate on the door — so sure was I 
— I rang the bell and informed the servant maid that a stranger 
sought audience of Mr. Specks. Into a room, half surgery, half 
study, I was shown to await his coming, and I found it, by a series 
of elaborate accidents, bestrewn with testimonies to Joe. Portrait 
of Mr. Specks, bust of Mr. Specks, silver cup from grateful patient 
to Mr. Specks, presentation sermon from local clergyman, dedica- 
tion poem from local poet, dinner-card from local nobleman, tract 
on balance of power from local refugee, inscribed Hommage de 
Vauteur a Specks. 

When my old schoolfellow came in, and I informed him with a 
smile that I was not a patient, he seemed rather at a loss to per- 
ceive any reason for smiling in connection with that fact, and 
inquired to what was he to attribute the honour ? I asked him, 
with another smile, could he remember me at all 1 He had not 
(he said) that pleasure. I was beginning to have but a poor opinion 
of Mr. Specks, when he said reflectively, "And yet there's a 
something too." Upon that, I saw a boyish light in his eyes that 
looked well, and I asked him if he could inform me, as a stranger 
who desired to know and had not the means of reference at hand, 
what the name of the young lady was, who married Mr. Random 1 
Upon that, he said "Narcissa," and, after staring for a moment, 
called me by my name, shook me by the hand, and melted into a 
roar of laughter. " Why, of course, you'll remember Lucy Green," 
he said, after we had talked a little. " Of course," said I. " Whom 
do you think she married 1 " said he. " You ? " I hazarded. " Me," 
said Specks, " and you shall see her." So I saw her, and she was 
fat, and if all the hay in the world had been heaped upon her, it 
could scarcely have altered her face more than Time had altered 
it from my remembrance of the face that had once looked down 
upon me into the fragrant dungeons of Seringapatam. But when 
her youngest child came in after dinner (for I dined with them, 
and we had no other company than Specks, Junior, Barrister-at- 
law, who went away as soon as the cloth was removed, to look 
after the young lady to whom he was going to be married next week), 
I saw again, in that little daughter, the little face of the hayfield, 
unchanged, and it quite touched my foolish heart. We talked 
immensely, Specks and Mrs. Specks, and I, and we spoke of our 
old selves as though our old selves were dead and gone, and indeed 
indeed they were — dead and gone as the playing-field that had 
become a wilderness of rusty iron, and the property of S.E.R. 

Specks, however, illuminated Dullborough with the rays of inter- 
est that I wanted and should otherwise have missed in it, and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 109 

linked its present to its past, with a highly agreeable chain. And 
in Specks's society I had new occasion to observe what I had before 
noticed in similar communications among other men. All the 
schoolfellows and others of old, whom I inquired about, had either 
done superlatively well or superlatively ill — had either become 
uncertificated bankrupts, or been felonious and got themselves trans- 
ported ; or had made great hits in life, and done wonders. And 
this is so commonly the case, that I never can imagine what becomes 
of all the mediocre people of people's youth — especially considering 
that we find no lack of the species in our maturity. But, I did 
not propound this difficulty to Specks, for no pause in the conver- 
sation gave me an occasion. Nor, could I discover one single flaw 
in the good doctor — when he reads this, he will receive in a friendly 
spirit the pleasantly meant record — except that he had forgotten 
his Roderick Random, and that he confounded Strap with Lieutenant 
Hatchway; who never knew Random, howsoever intimate with 
Pickle. 

When I went alone to the Railway to catch my train at night 
(Specks had meant to go with me, but was inopportunely called 
out), I was in a more charitable mood with Dullborough than I 
had been all day ; and yet in my heart I had loved it all day too. 
Ah! who was I that I should quarrel with the town for being 
changed to me, when I myself had come back, so changed, to it ! 
All my early readings and early imaginations dated from this place, 
and I took them away so full of innocent construction and guileless 
belief, and I brought them back so worn and torn, so much the 
wiser and so much the worse ! 



All the Year Round, Vol. 3, iVo. 65, July 21, 1860. 
XIII. 

NIGHT WALKS. 

Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a 
distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night, 
for a series of several nights. The disorder might have taken a 
long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in 
bed; but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting 
up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired 
at sunrise. 

In the course of those nights, I finished my education in a fair 
amateur experience of houselessness. My principal object being to 



110 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

get through the night, the pursuit of it brought me into sympathetic 
relations with people who have no other object every night in the 
year. 

The month was March, and the weather damp, cloudy, and cold. 
The sun not rising before half-past five, the night perspective looked 
sufiBciently long at half-past twelve : which was about my time for 
confronting it. 

The restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles 
and tosses before it can get to sleep, formed one of the first enter- 
tainments offered to the contemplation of us houseless people. It 
lasted about two hours. We lost a great deal of companionship 
when the late public-houses turned their lamps out, and when the 
potmen thrust the last brawling drunkards into the street ; but 
stray vehicles and stray people were left us, after that. If we were 
very lucky, a policeman's rattle sprang and a fray turned up ; but, 
in general, surprisingly little of this diversion was provided. Except 
in the Haymarket, which is the worst kept part of London, and 
about Kent-street in the Borough, and along a portion of the line 
of the Old Kent-road, the peace was seldom violently broken. But, 
it was always the case that London, as if in imitation of individual 
citizens belonging to it, had expiring fits and starts of restlessness. 
After all seemed quiet, if one cab rattled by, half-a-dozen would 
surely follow ; and Houselessness even observed that intoxicated 
people appeared to be magnetically attracted towards each other ; 
so that we knew when we saw one drunken object staggering 
against the shutters of a shop, that another drunken object would 
stagger up before five minutes were out, to fraternise or fight with 
it. When we made a divergence from the regular species of drunk- 
ard, the thin-armed, puff-faced, leaden-lipped gin-drinker, and en- 
countered a rarer specimen of a more decent appearance, fifty to one 
but that specimen was dressed in soiled mourning. As the street 
experience in the night, so the street experience in the day ; the 
common folk who come unexpectedly into a little property, come 
unexpectedly into a deal of liquor. 

At length these flickering sparks would die away, worn out — 
the last veritable sparks of waking life trailed from some late pie- 
man or hot-potato man — and London would sink to rest. And 
then the yearning of the houseless mind would be for any sign of 
company, any lighted place, any movement, anything suggestive of 
any one being up — nay, even so much as awake, for the houseless 
eye looked out for lights in windows. 

Walking the streets under the pattering rain, Houselessness 
would walk and walk and walk, seeing nothing but the intermi- 
nable tangle of streets, save at a corner, here and there, two police- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. Ill 

men in conversation, or the sergeant or inspector looking after his 
men. Now and then in the night — but rarely — Houselessness 
would become aware of a furtive head peering out of a doorway a 
few yards before him, and, coming up with the head, would find a 
man standing bolt upright to keep within the doorway's shadow, 
and evidently intent upon no particular service to society. Under 
a kind of fascination, and in a ghostly silence suitable to the time, 
Houselessness and this gentleman would eye one another from head 
to foot, and so, without exchange of speech, part, mutually suspi- 
cious. Drip, drip, drip, from ledge and coping, splash from pipes 
and water-spouts, and by-and-bye the houseless shadow would fall 
upon the stones that pave the way to Waterloo-bridge ; it being in 
the houseless mind to have a halfpenny worth of excuse for saying 
*' Good-night " to the toll-keeper, and catching a glimpse of his 
fire. A good fire and a good great-coat and a good woollen neck- 
shawl, were comfortable things to see in conjunction with the toll- 
keeper ; also his brisk wakefulness was excellent company when he 
rattled the change of halfpence down upon that metal table of his, 
like a man who defied the night, with all its sorrowful thoughts, 
and didn't care for the coming of dawn. There was need of en- 
couragement on the threshold of the bridge, for the bridge was 
dreary. The chopped-up murdered man, had not been lowered 
with a rope over the parapet when those nights were ; he was alive, 
and slept then quietly enough most likely, and undisturbed by any 
dream of where he was to come. But the river had an awful look, 
the buildings on the banks were muffled in black shrouds, and the 
reflected lights seemed to originate deep in the water, as if the 
spectres of suicides were holding them to show where they went 
down. The wild moon and clouds were as restless as an evil con- 
science in a tumbled bed, and the very shadow of the immensity 
of London seemed to lie oppressively upon the river. 

Between the bridge and the two great theatres, there was but 
the distance of a few hundred paces, so the theatres came next. 
Grim and black within, at night, those great dry Wells, and lone- 
some to imagine, with the rows of faces faded out, the lights ex- 
tinguished, and the seats all empty. One would think that nothing 
in them knew itself at such a time but Yorick's skull. In one of 
my night walks, as the church steeples were shaking the March 
winds and rain with the strokes of Four, I passed the outer boun- 
dary of one of these great deserts, and entered it. With a dim 
lantern in my hand, I groped my well-known way to the stage and 
looked over the orchestra — which was like a great grave dug for 
a time of pestilence — into the void beyond. A dismal cavern of 
an immense aspect, with the chandelier gone dead like everything 



112 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

else, and nothing visible through mist and fog and space, but tiers 
of winding-sheets. The ground at my feet where, when last there, 
I had seen the peasantry of Naples dancing among the vines, reck- 
less of the burning mountain which threatened to overwhelm them, 
was now in possession of a strong serpent of engine-hose, watch- 
fully lying in wait for the serpent Fire, and ready to fly at it if it 
showed its forked tongue. A ghost of a watchman, carrying a 
faint corpse candle, haunted the distant upper gallery and flitted 
away. Ketiring within the proscenium, and holding my light 
above my head towards the roUed-up curtain — green no more, but 
black as ebony — my sight lost itself in a gloomy vault, showing 
faint indications in it of a shipwreck of canvas and cordage. Me- 
thought I felt much as a diver might, at the bottom of the sea. 

In those small hours when there was no movement in the streets, 
it afforded matter for reflection to take Newgate in the way, and, 
touching its rough stone, to think of the prisoners in their sleep, 
and then to glance in at the lodge over the spiked wicket, and see 
the fire and light of the watching turnkeys, on the white wall. 
Not an inappropriate time either, to linger by that wicked little 
Debtors' Door — shutting tighter than any other door one ever saw 
— which has been Death's Door to so many. In the days of the 
uttering of forged one-pound notes by people tempted up from the 
country, how many hundreds of wretched creatures of both sexes — 
many quite innocent — swung out of a pitiless and inconsistent 
world, with the tower of yonder Christian church of Saint Sepulchre 
monstrously before their eyes ! Is there any haunting of the Bank 
Parlour, by the remorseful souls of old directors, in the nights of 
these later days, I wonder, or is it as quiet as this degenerate 
Aceldama of an Old Bailey ? 

To walk on to the Bank, lamenting the good old times and 
bemoaning the present evil period, would be an easy next step, so 
I would take it, and would make my houseless circuit of the Bank, 
and give a thought to the treasure within ; likewise to the guard 
of soldiers passing the night there, and nodding over the fire. Next, 
I went to Billingsgate, in some hope of market-people, but it prov- 
ing as yet too early, crossed London-bridge and got down by the 
water-side on the Surrey shore among the buildings of the great 
brewery. There was plenty going on at the brewery ; and the 
reek, and the smell of grains, and the rattling of the plump dray 
horses at their mangers, were capital company. Quite refreshed 
by having mingled with this good society, I made a new start with 
a new heart, setting the old King's Bench prison before me for my 
next object, and resolving, when I should come to the wall, to think 
of poor Horace Kinch, and the Dry Rot in men. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 113 

A very curious disease the Dry Rot in men, and difficult to 
detect the beginning of. It had carried Horace Kinch inside the 
wall of the old King's Bench prison, and it had carried him out 
with his feet foremost. He was a likely man to look at, in the 
prime of life, well to do, as clever as he needed to be, and popular 
among many friends. He was suitably married, and had healthy 
and pretty children. But, like some fair-looking houses or fair-look- 
ing ships, he took the Dry Rot. The first strong external revela- 
tion of the Dry Rot in men, is a tendency to lurk and lounge ; to be 
at street-corners without inteUigible reason ; to be going anywhere 
when met ; to be about many places rather than at any ; to do noth- 
ing tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of intan- 
gible duties to-morrow or the day after. When this manifestation 
of the disease is observed, the observer will usually connect it with 
a vague impression once formed or received, that the patient was 
living a little too hard. He will scarcely have had leisure to turn 
it over in his mind and form the terrible suspicion "Dry Rot," 
when he will notice a change for the worse in the patient's appear- 
ance : a certain slovenliness and deterioration, which is not poverty, 
nor dirt, nor intoxication, nor ill-health, but simply Dry Rot. To 
this, succeeds a smell as of strong waters, in the morning ; to that, 
a looseness respecting money ; to that a stronger smell as of strong 
waters, at all times ; to that, a looseness respecting everything ; to 
that, a trembling of the limbs, somnolency, misery, and crumbling 
to pieces. As it is in wood, so it is in men. Dry Rot advances 
at a compound usury quite incalculable. A plank is found infected 
with it, and the whole structure is devoted. Thus it had been 
with the unhappy Horace Kinch, lately buried by a small subscrip- 
tion. Those who knew him had not nigh done saying, " So well 
off, so comfortably established, with such hope before him — and 
yet, it is feared, with a slight touch of Dry Rot ! " when lo ! the 
man was all Dry Rot and dust. 

From the dead wall associated on those houseless nights with 
this too common story, I chose next to wander by Bethlehem Hos- 
pital ; partly, because it lay on my road round to Westminster ; 
partly, because I had a night fancy in my head which could be best 
pursued within sight of its walls and dome. And the fancy was 
this : Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane 
lie a dreaming 1 Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, 
more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our 
lives 1 Are we not nightly persuaded, as they daily are, that we 
associate preposterously with kings and queens, emperors and 
empresses, and notabilities of all sorts 1 Do we not nightly jumble 
events and personages and times and places, as these do daily? 



114 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Are we not sometimes troubled by our own sleeping inconsistencies, 
and do we not vexedly try to account for them or excuse them, just 
as these do sometimes in respect of their waking delusions ? Said 
an afflicted man to me, when I was last in a hospital like this, " Sir, 
I can frequently fly." I was half ashamed to reflect that so could 
I — by night. Said a woman to me on the same occasion, " Queen 
Victoria frequently comes to dine with me, and her Majesty and I 
dine off peaches and maccaroni in our night-gowns, and his Royal 
Highness the Prince Consort does us the honour to make a third 
on horseback in a Field-Marshal's uniform." Could I refrain from 
reddening with consciousness when I remembered the amazing royal 
parties I myself had given (at night), the unaccountable viands I 
had put on table, and my extraordinary manner of conducting my- 
self on those distinguished occasions 1 I wonder that the great mas- 
ter who knew everything, when he called Sleep the death of each 
day's life, did not call Dreams the insanity of each day's sanity. 

By this time I had left the Hospital behind me, and was again 
setting towards the river ; and in a short breathing space I was on 
Westminster-bridge, regaling my houseless eyes with the external 
walls of the British Parliament — the perfection of a stupendous in- 
stitution, I know, and the admiration of all surrounding nations and 
succeeding ages, I do not doubt, but perhaps a little the better 
now and then for being pricked up to its work. Turning off into 
Old Palace-yard the Courts of Law kept me company for a quarter 
of an hour ; hinting in low whispers what numbers of people ihej 
were keeping awake, and how intensely wretched and horrible they 
were rendering the small hours to unfortunate suitors. Westminster 
Abbey was fine gloomy society for another quarter of an hour ; sug- 
gesting a wonderful procession of its dead among the dark arches 
and pillars, each century more amazed by the century following it 
than by all the centuries going before. And indeed in those house- 
less nightwalks — which even included cemeteries where watchmen 
went round among the graves at stated times, and moved the tell- 
tale handle of an index which recorded that they had touched it at 
such an hour — it was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts 
of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised 
while the living slept, there would not be the space of a pin's point 
in all the streets and ways for the living to come out into. Not 
only that, but the vast armies of dead would overflow the hills 
and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it, 
God knows how far. 

When a church clock strikes, on houseless ears in the dead of the 
night, it may be at first mistaken for company and hailed as such. 
But, as the spreading circles of vibration, which you may perceive 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 115 

at such a time with great clearness, go opening out, for ever and 
ever afterwards widening perhaps (as the philosopher has suggested) 
in eternal space, the mistake is rectified and the sense of loneliness is 
profounder. Once — it was after leaving the Abbey and turning 
my face north — I came to the great steps of St. Martin's church 
as the clock was striking Three. Suddenly, a thing that in a 
moment more I should have trodden upon without seeing, rose up 
at my feet with a cry of loneliness and houselessness, struck out of 
it by the bell, the like of which I never heard. We then stood 
face to face looking at one another, frightened by one another. 
The creature was like a beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty, 
and it had a loose bundle of rags on, which it held together with 
one of its hands. It shivered from head to foot, and its teeth chat- 
tered, and as it stared at me — persecutor, devil, ghost, whatever 
it thought me — it made with its whining mouth as if it were 
snapping at me, like a worried dog. Intending to give this ugly 
object, money, I put out my hand to stay it — for it recoiled as it 
whined and snapped — and laid my hand upon its shoulder. In- 
stantly, it twisted out of its garment, like the young man in the 
New Testament, and left me standing alone with its rags in my 
hand. 

Covent-garden Market, when it was market morning, was won- 
derful company. The great waggons of cabbages, with growers, 
men and boys lying asleep under them, and with sharp dogs from 
market-garden neighbourhoods looking after the whole, were as 
good as a party. But one of the worst night sights I know in 
London, is to be found in the children who prowl about this place ; 
who sleep in the baskets, fight for the offal, dart at any object they 
think they can lay their thieving hands on, dive under the carts and 
barrows, dodge the constables, and are perpetually making a blunt 
pattering on the pavement of the Piazza with the rain of their naked 
feet. A painful and unnatural result comes of the comparison one 
is forced to institute between the growth of corruption as displayed 
in the so much improved and cared for fruits of the earth, and the 
growth of corruption as displayed in these all uncared for (except 
inasmuch as ever-hunted) savages. 

There was early coffee to be got about Covent-garden Market, 
and that was more company — warm company, too, which was 
better. Toast of a very substantial quality, was likewise procura- 
ble : though the towzled-headed man who made it, in an inner 
chamber within the coffee-room, hadn't got his coat on yet, and 
was so heavy with sleep that in every interval of toast and coffee 
he went off anew behind the partition into complicated cross-roads 
of choke and snore, and lost his way directly. Into one of these 



116 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

establishments (among the earliest) near Bow-street, there came 
one morning as I sat over my houseless cup, pondering where to 
go next, a man in a high and long snufF-coloured coat, and shoes, 
and, to the best of my belief, nothing else but a hat, who took out 
of his hat a large cold meat pudding ; a meat pudding so large that 
it was a very tight fit, and brought the lining of the hat out with 
it. This mysterious man was known by his pudding, for on his 
entering, the man of sleep brought him a pint of hot tea, a small 
loaf, and a large knife and fork and plate. Left to himself in his 
box, he stood the pudding on the bare table, and, instead of cutting 
it, stabbed it, over-hand, with the knife, like a mortal enemy; then 
took the knife out, wiped it on his sleeve, tore the pudding asunder 
with his fingers, and ate it all up. The remembrance of this man 
with the pudding remains with me as the remembrance of the 
most spectral person my houselessness encountered. Twice only 
was I in that establishment, and twice I saw him stalk in (as I 
should say, just out of bed, and presently going back to bed), take 
out his pudding, stab his pudding, wipe the dagger, and eat his 
pudding all up. He was a man whose figure promised cadaverous- 
ness, but who had an excessively red face, though shaped like a 
horse's. On the second occasion of my seeing him, he said, huskily 
to the man of sleep, "Am I red to-night?" "You are," he uncom- 
promisingly answered. "My mother," said the spectre, "was a 
red-faced woman that liked drink, and I looked at her hard when 
she laid in her coflQn, and I took the complexion." Somehow, the 
pudding seemed an unwholesome pudding after that, and I put 
myself in its way no more. 

When there was no market, or when I wanted variety, a rail- 
way terminus with the morning mails coming in, was remunerative 
company. But like most of the company to be had in this world, 
it lasted only a very short time. The station lamps would burst 
out ablaze, the porters would emerge from places of concealment, 
the cabs and trucks would rattle to their places (the post-office 
carts were already in theirs), and, finally, the bell would strike up, 
and the train would come banging in. But there were few passen- 
gers and little luggage, and everything scuttled away with the 
greatest expedition. The locomotive post-offices, with their great 
nets — as if they had been dragging the country for bodies — 
would fly open as to their doors, and would disgorge a smell of 
lamp, an exhausted clerk, a guard in a red coat, and their bags of 
letters; the engine would blow and heave and perspire, like an 
engine wiping its forehead and saying what a run it had had ; and 
within ten minutes the lamps were out, and I was houseless and 
alone again. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 117 

But now, there were driven cattle on the high road near, want- 
ing (as cattle always do) to turn into the midst of stone walls, and 
squeeze themselves through six inches' width of iron railing, and 
getting their heads down (also as cattle always do) for tossing- 
purchase at quite imaginary dogs, and giving themselves and every 
devoted creature associated with them a most extraordinary amount 
of unnecessary trouble. Now, too, the conscious gas began to grow 
pale with the knowledge that daylight was coming, and straggling 
workpeople were already in the streets, and, as waking life had 
become extinguished with the last pieman's sparks, so it began to 
be rekindled with the fires of the first street corner breakfast-sellers. 
And so by faster and faster degrees, until the last degrees were very 
fast, the day came, and I was tired and could sleep. And it is not, 
as I used to think, going home at such times, the least wonderful 
thing in London, that in the real desert region of the night, the 
houseless wanderer is alone there. I knew well enough where to 
find Vice and Misfortune of all kinds, if I had chosen ; but they 
were put out of sight, and my houselessness had many miles upon 
miles of streets in which it could, and did, have its own solitary 
way. 



All the Year Bound, Vol. 3, No. 69, Aug. 18, 1860. 
XIV. 

CHAMBERS. 

Having occasion to transact some business with a solicitor who 
occupies a highly suicidal set of chambers in Gray's Inn, I after- 
wards took a turn in the large square of that stronghold of Melan- 
choly, reviewing, with congenial surroundings, my experiences of 
Chambers. 

I began, as was natural, with the Chambers I had just left. 
They were an upper set on a rotten staircase, with a mysterious 
bunk or bulkhead on the landing outside them, of a rather nautical 
and Screw Collier-like appearance than otherwise, and painted an 
intense black. Many dusty years have passed since the appropri- 
ation of this Davy Jones's locker to any purpose, and during the 
whole period within the memory of living man, it has been hasped 
and padlocked. I cannot quite satisfy my mind whether it was 
originally meant for the reception of coals, or bodies, or as a place 
of temporary security for the plunder "looted" by laundresses; 
but I incline to the last opinion. It is about breast high, and 
usually serves as a bulk for defendants in reduced circumstances to 



118 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

lean against and ponder at, when they come on the hopeful errand 
of trying to make an arrangement without money — under which 
auspicious circumstances it mostly happens that the legal gentle- 
man they want to see, is much engaged, and they pervade the 
staircase for a considerable period. Against this opposing bulk, in 
the absurdest manner, the tomb-like outer door of the solicitor's 
chambers (which is also of an intense black) stands in dark am- 
bush, half open, and half shut, all day. The solicitor's apartments 
are three in number; consisting of a slice, a cell, and a wedge. 
The slice is assigned to the two clerks, the cell is occupied by the 
principal, and the wedge is devoted to stray papers, old game bas- 
kets from the country, a washing-stand, and a model of a patent 
Ship's Caboose which was exhibited in Chancery at the commence- ■ 
ment of the present century on an application for an injunction to 
restrain infringement. At about half-past nine on every week-day 
morning, the younger of the two clerks (who, I have reason to 
believe, leads the fashion at Pentonville in the articles of pipes 
and shirts) may be found knocking the dust out of his official door- 
key on the bunk or locker before mentioned ; and so exceedingly 
subject to dust is his key, and so very retentive of that superfluity, 
that in exceptional summer weather when a ray of sunlight has 
fallen on the locker in my presence, I have noticed its inexpressive 
countenance to be deeply marked by a kind of Bramah erysipelas 
or small-pox. 

This set of chambers (as I have gradually discovered, when I 
have had restless occasion to make inquiries or leave messages, 
after office hours) is under the charge of a lady named Sweeney, in 
figure extremely like an old family-umbrella : whose dwelling con- 
fronts a dead wall in a court off Gray's Inn-lane, and who is usually 
fetched into the passage of that bower, when wanted, from some 
neighbouring home of industry, which has the curious property of 
imparting an inflammatory appearance to her visage. Mrs. Sweeney 
is one of the race of professed laundresses, and is the compiler of a 
remarkable manuscript volume entitled "Mrs. Sweeney's Book," 
from which much curious statistical information may be gathered 
respecting the high prices and small uses of soda, soap, sand, fire- 
wood, and other such articles. I have created a legend in my 
mind — and consequently I believe it with the utmost pertinacity 
— that the late Mr. Sweeney was a ticket-porter under the Hon- 
ourable Society of Gray's Inn, and that, in consideration of his long 
and valuable services, Mrs. Sweeney was appointed to her present 
post. For, though devoid of personal charms, I have observed this 
lady to exercise a fascination over the elderly ticket-porter mind 
(particularly under the gateway, and in corners and entries), which 




LATJNDKESSES. 



120 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

I can only refer to her being one of the fraternity, yet not compet- 
ing with it. All that need be said concerning this set of chambers, 
is said, when I have added that it is in a large double house in 
Gray's Inn-square, very much out of repair, and that the outer 
portal is ornamented in a hideous manner with certain stone 
remains, which have the appearance of the dismembered bust, 
torso, and limbs of a petrified bencher. 

Indeed, I look upon Gray's Inn generally as one of the most 
depressing institutions in brick and mortar, known to the children 
of men. Can anything be more dreary than its arid Square, Saha- 
rah Desert of the law, with the ugly old tiled-topped tenements, 
the dirty windows, the bills To Let To Let, the door-posts inscribed 
like gravestones, the crazy gateway giving upon the filthy Lane, the 
scowling iron-barred prison-like passage into Verulam-buildings, the 
mouldy red-nosed ticket-porters with little coflin plates and why 
with aprons, the dry hard atomy-like appearance of the whole dust- 
heap 1 When my uncommercial travels tend to this dismal spot, 
my comfort is its rickety state. Imagination gloats over the ful- 
ness of time when the staircases shall have quite tumbled down — 
they are daily w^earing into an ill-savoured powder, but have not 
quite tumbled down yet — when the last old prolix bencher all of 
the olden time, shall have been got out of an upper window by 
means of a Fire Ladder, and carried off" to the Holborn Union; 
when the last clerk shall have engrossed the last parchment behind 
the last splash on the last of the mud-stained windows, which, aU 
through the miry year, are pilloried out of recognition in Gray's 
Inn-lane. Then, shall a squalid little trench, with rank grass and 
a pump in it, lying between the cofiee-house and South-square, be 
wholly given up to cats and rats, and not, as now, have its empire 
divided betv/een those animals and a few briefless bipeds — surely 
called to the Bar by voices of deceiving spirits, seeing that they are 
wanted there by no mortal — who glance down, with eyes better 
glazed than their casements, from their dreary and lack-lustre 
rooms. Then shall the way Nor' Westward, now lying under a 
short grim colonnade where in summer time pounce flies from law 
stationering windows into the eyes of laymen, be choked with rub- 
bish and happily become impassable. Then shall the gardens 
where turf, trees, and gravel wear a legal livery of black, run rank, 
and pilgrims go to Gorhambury to see Bacon's efiigy as he sat, and 
not come here (which in truth they seldom do) to see where he 
walked. Then, in a word, shall the old-established vendor of peri- 
odicals sit alone in his little crib of a shop behind the Holborn 
Gate, like that lumbering Marius among the ruins of Carthage, 
who has sat heavy on a thousand million of similes. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 121 

At one period of my uncommercial career I much frequented 
another set of chambers in Gray's Inn-square. They were what is 
familiarly called "a top set," and all the eatables and drinkables 
introduced into them acquired a flavour of Cockloft. I have 
known an unopened Strasbourg patd fresh from Fortnum and 
Mason's, to draw in this cockloft tone through its crockery dish, 
and become penetrated with cockloft to the core of its inmost 
truffle in three-quarters of an hour. This, however, was not the 
most curious feature of those chambers ; that, consisted in the pro- 
found conviction entertained by my esteemed friend Parkle (their 
tenant) that they were clean. Whether it was an inborn halluci- 
nation, or whether it was imparted to him by Mrs. Miggot the laun- 
dress, I never could ascertain. But, I believe he would have gone 
to the stake upon the question. Now, they were so dirty that I 
could take off the distinctest impression of my figure on any article 
of furniture by merely lounging upon it for a few moments ; and it 
used to be a private amusement of mine to print myself off — if I 
may use the expression — all over the rooms. It was the first 
large circulation I had. At other times I have accidentally shaken 
a window curtain while in animated conversation with Parkle, and 
struggling insects which were certainly red, and were certainly not 
ladybirds, have dropped on the back of my hand. Yet Parkle 
lived in that top set years, bound body and soul to the super- 
stition that they were clean. He used to say, when congrat- 
ulated upon them, "Well, they are not like chambers in one 
respect, you know ; they are clean." Concurrently, he had an idea 
which he could never explain, that Mrs. Miggot was in some way 
connected with the Church. When he was in particularly good 
spirits, he used to believe that a deceased uncle of hers had been a 
Dean ; when he was poorly and low, he believed that her brother 
bad been a Curate. I and Mrs. Miggot (she was a genteel woman) 
were on confidential terms, but I never knew her to commit herself 
to any distinct assertion on the subject; she merely claimed a 
proprietorship in the Church, by looking when it was mentioned, 
as if the reference awakened the slumbering Past, and were per- 
sonal. It may have been his amiable confidence in Mrs. Miggot's 
better days that inspired my friend with his delusion respecting 
the chambers, but he never wavered in his fidelity to it for a 
moment, though he wallowed in dirt seven years. 

Two of the windows of these chambers looked down into the 
garden; and we have sat up there together many a summer 
evening, saying how pleasant it was, and talking of many things. 
To my intimacy with that top set, I am indebted for three of 
my liveliest personal impressions of the loneliness of life in 



122 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

chambers. They shall follow here, in order; first, second, and 
third. 

First. My Gray's Inn friend, on a time, hurt one of his legs, 
and it became seriously inflamed. Not knowing of his indisposi- 
tion, I was on my way to visit him as usual, one summer evening, 
when I was much surprised by meeting a lively leech in Field-court, 
Gray's Inn, seemingly on his way to the AVest End of London. 
As the leech was alone, and was of course unable to explain his 
position, even if he had been inclined to do so (which he had not 
the appearance of being), I passed him and went on. Turning the 
corner of Gray's Inn-square, I w^as beyond expression amazed by 
meeting another leech — also entirely alone, and also proceeding in 
a westerly direction, though with less decision of purpose. Rumi- 
nating on this extraordinary circumstance, and endeavouring to 
remember whether I had ever read, in the Philosophical Trans- 
actions or any work on Natural History, of a migration of 
Leeches, I ascended to the top set, past the dreary series of closed 
outer doors of offices and an empty set or two, which intervened 
between that lofty region and the surface. Entering my friend's 
rooms, I found him stretched upon his back, like Prometheus Bound, 
with a perfectly demented ticket-porter in attendance on him instead 
of the Vulture : which helpless individual, who was feeble and 
frightened, and had (my friend explained to me, in great choler) 
been endeavouring for some hours to apply leeches to his leg, and 
as yet had only got on two out of twenty. To this Unfortunate's 
distraction between a damp cloth on which he had placed the leeches 
to freshen them, and the wrathful adjurations of my friend to 
" Stick 'em on, sir ! " I referred the phenomenon I had encoun- 
tered : the rather as two fine specimens were at that moment going 
out at the door, while a general insurrection of the rest was in 
progress on the table. After a while our united efforts prevailed, 
and, when the leeches came off and had recovered their spirits, we 
carefully tied them up in a decanter. But I never heard more 
of them than that they were all gone next morning, and that the 
Out-of-door young man of Bickle Bush and Bodger, on the ground 
floor, had been bitten and blooded by some creature not identified. 
They never "took" on Mrs. Miggot, the laundress; but, I have 
always preserved fresh, the belief that she unconsciously carried 
several about her, until they gradually found openings in life. 

Second. On the same staircase with my friend Parkle, and on 
the same floor, there lived a man of law who pursued his business 
elsewhere, and used those chambers as his place of residence. For 
three or four years, Parkle rather knew of him than knew him, but 
after that — for Englishmen — short pause of consideration, they 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLEE. 123 

began to speak. Parkle exchanged words witli him in his private 
character only, and knew nothing of his business ways, or means. 
He was a man a good deal about town, but always alone. We 
used to remark to one another, that although we often encountered 
him in theatres, concert-rooms, and similar public places, he was 
always alone. Yet he was not a gloomy man, and was of a decid- 
edly conversational turn ; insomuch that he would sometimes of an 
evening lounge with a cigar in his mouth, half in and half out of 
Parkle's rooms, and discuss the topics of the day by the hour. He 
used to hint on these occasions that he had four faults to find with 
life; firstly, that it obliged a man to be always winding up his 
watch ; secondly, that London was too small ; thirdly, that it there- 
fore wanted variety ; fourthly, that there was too much dust in it. 
There was so much dust in his own faded chambers, certainly, that 
they reminded me of a sepulchre, furnished in prophetic anticipation 
of the present time, which had newly been brought to light, after 
having remained buried a few thousand years. One dry hot autumn 
evening at twilight, this man, being then five years turned of fifty, 
looked in upon Parkle in his usual lounging way, with his cigar in his 
mouth as usual, and said, " I am going out of town." As he never 
went out of town, Parkle said, " Oh indeed ! At last 1 " " Yes," 
says he, " at last. For what is a man to do ? London is so small ! 
If you go West, you come to Hounslow. If you go East, you come 
to Bow. If you go South, there's Brixton or Norwood. If you go 
North, you can't get rid of Barnet. Then, the monotony of aU the 
streets, streets, streets — and of all the roads, roads, roads — and 
the dust, dust, dust ! " When he had said this, he wished Parkle a 
good evening, but came back again and said, with his watch in 
his hand, " Oh, I really cannot go on winding up this watch over 
and over again ; I wish you would take care of it." So, Parkle 
laughed and consented, and the man went out of town. The man 
remained out of town so long, that his letter-box became choked, 
and no more letters could be got into it, and they began to be 
left at the lodge and to accumulate there. At last the head- 
porter decided, on conference with the steward, to use his master- 
key and look into the chambers, and give them the benefit of a 
whiff of air. Then, it was found that he had hanged himself to 
his bedstead, and had left this written memorandum : " I should 
prefer to be cut down by my neighbour and friend (if he will allow 
me to call him so), H. Parkle, Esq." This was an end of Parkle's 
occupancy of chambers. He went into lodgings immediately. 

Third, While Parkle lived in Gray's Inn, and I myself was 
uncommercially preparing for the Bar — which is done, as every- 
body knows, by having a frayed old gown put on in a pantry by 



124 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

an old woman in a chronic state of Saint Anthony's fire and 
dropsy, and, so decorated, bolting a bad dinner in. a party of four, 
whereof each individual mistrusts the other three — I say, while 
these things were, there was a certain elderly gentleman who lived 
in a court of the Temple, and was a great judge and lover of port wine. 
Every day he dined at his club and drank his bottle or two of port 
wine, and every night came home to the Temple and went to bed 
in his lonely chambers. This had gone on many years without 
variation, when one night he had a fit on coming home, and fell 
and cut his head deep, but partly recovered and groped about in 
the dark to find the door. When he was afterwards discovered, 
dead, it was clearly established by the marks of his hands about 
the room that he must have done so. Now, this chanced on the 
night of Christmas Eve, and over him lived a young feUow who had 
sisters and young country-friends, and who gave them a little party 
that night, in the course of which they played at Blindman's Buff. 
They played that game, for their greater sport, by the light of the 
fire only ; and once, when they were all quietly rustling and stealing 
about, and the blindman was trying to pick out the prettiest sister 
(for which I am far from blaming him), somebody cried. Hark ! 
The man below must be playing Blindman's Buff by himself to- 
night ! They listened, and they heard sounds of some one falling 
about and stumbling against furniture, and they all laughed at the 
conceit, and went on with their play, more lighthearted and merry 
than ever. Thus, those two so different games of life and death 
were played out together, blindfolded, in the two sets of chambers. 

Such are the occurrences, which, coming to my knowledge, 
imbued me long ago with a strong sense of the loneliness of cham- 
bers. There was a fantastic illustration to much the same purpose 
implicitly believed by a strange sort of man now dead, whom I 
knew when I had not quite arrived at legal years of discretion, 
though I was already in the uncommercial line. 

This was a man who, though not more than thirty, had seen the 
world in divers irreconcilable capacities — had been an officer in a 
South American regiment among other odd things — but had not 
achieved much in any way of life, and was in debt, and in hiding. 
He occupied chambers of the dreariest nature in Lyons Inn ; his 
name, however, was not up on the door, or door-post, but in lieu of 
it stood the name of a friend who had died in the chambers, and 
had given him the furniture. The story arose out of the furniture, 
and was to this effect : — Let the former holder of the chambers, 
whose name was still upon the door and door-post, be Mr. Testator. 

Mr. Testator took a set of chambers in Lyons Inn when he had 
but very scanty furniture for his bedroom, and none for his sitting 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 125 

room. He had lived some wintry months in this condition, and 
had found it very bare and cold. One night, past midnight, when 
he sat writing and still had writing to do that must be done before 
he went to bed, he found himself out of coals. He had coals 
down-stairs, but had never been to his cellar ; however, the cellar- 
key was on his mantelshelf, and if he went down and opened the 
cellar it fitted, he might fairly assume the coals in that cellar to be 
his. As to his laundress, she lived among the coal-waggons and 
Thames watermen — for there were Thames watermen at that time 
— in some unknown rat-hole by the river, down lanes and alleys 
on the other side of the Strand. As to any other person to meet 
him or obstruct him, Lyons Inn was dreaming, drunk, maudlin, 
moody, betting, brooding over bill-discounting or renewing — asleep 
or awake, minding its own affairs. Mr. Testator took his coal- 
scuttle in one hand, his candle and key in the other, and descended 
to the dismalest underground dens of Lyons Inn, where the late 
vehicles in the streets became thunderous, and all the water-pipes 
in the neighbourhood seemed to have Macbeth's Amen sticking in 
their throats, and to be trying to get it out. After groping here 
and there among low doors to no purpose, Mr. Testator at length 
came to a door with a rusty padlock which his key fitted. Getting 
the door open with much trouble, and looking in, he found, no 
coals, but a confused pile of furniture. Alarmed by this intrusion 
on another man's property, he locked the door again, found his own 
cellar, filled his scuttle, and returned up-stairs. 

But the furniture he had seen, ran on castors across and across 
Mr. Testator's mind incessantly, when, in the chill hour of five in 
the morning, he got to bed. He particularly wanted a table to 
write at, and a table expressly made to be written at, had been the 
piece of furniture in the foreground of the heap. When his laun- 
dress emerged from her burrow in the morning to make his kettle 
boil, he artfully led up to the subject of cellars and furniture ; but 
the two ideas had evidently no connection in her mind. When she 
left him, and he sat at his breakfast, thinking about the furniture, 
he recalled the rusty state of the padlock, and inferred that the 
furniture must have been stored in the cellars for a long time — 
was perhaps forgotten — owner dead, perhaps ? After thinking it 
over, a few days, in the course of which he could pump nothing out 
of Lyons Inn about the furniture, he became desperate, and resolved 
to borrow that table. He did so, that night. He had not had 
the table long, when he determined to borrow an easy-chair ; he 
had not had that long, when he made up his mind to borrow a 
bookcase ; then, a couch ; then, a carpet and rug. By that time, 
he felt he was "in furniture stepped in so far," as that it could be 



126 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

no worse to borrow it all. Consequently, he borrowed it all, and 
locked up the cellar for good. He had always locked it, after every 
visit. He had carried up every separate article in the dead of the 
night, and, at the best, had felt as wicked as a Resurrection Man. 
Every article was blue and furry when brought into his rooms, and 
he had had, in a murderous and guilty sort of way, to polish it up 
while London slept. 

Mr. Testator lived in his furnished chambers two or three years, 
or more, and gradually lulled himself into the opinion that the 
furniture was his own. This was his convenient state of mind 
when, late one night, a step came up the stairs, and a hand passed 
over his door feeling for his knocker, and then one deep and sol- 
emn rap was rapped that might have been a spring in Mr. Testa- 
tor's easy-chair to shoot him out of it ; so promptly was it 
attended with that effect. 

With a candle in his hand, Mr. Testator went to the door, and 
found there, a very pale and very tall man ; a man who stooped ; 
a man with very high shoulders, a very narrow chest, and a very 
red nose; a shabby-genteel man. He was wrapped in a long 
threadbare black coat, fastened up the front with more pins than 
buttons, and under his arm he squeezed an umbrella without a 
handle, as if he were playing bagpipes. He said, "I ask your 

pardon, but can you tell me " and stopped ; his eyes resting 

on some object within the chambers. 

" Can I tell you what ? " asked Mr. Testator, noting his stop- 
page with quick alarm. 

"I ask your pardon," said the stranger, "but — this is not the 
inquiry I was going to make — - do I see in there, any small arti- 
cle of property belonging to me ? " 

Mr. Testator was beginning to stammer that he was not aware 
— when the visitor slipped past him, into the chambers. There, 
in a goblin way which froze Mr. Testator to the marrow, he 
examined, j&rst, the writing-table, and said, " Mine ; " then, the 
easy-chair, and said, " Mine ; " then, the bookcase, and said, 
"Mine;" then, turned up a corner of the carpet, and said, 
" Mine ! " in a word, inspected every item of furniture from the 
cellar, in succession, and said, " Mine ! " Towards the end of this 
investigation, Mr. Testator perceived that he was sodden with 
liquor, and that the liquor was gin. He was not unsteady with 
gin, either in his speech or carriage ; but he was stiff with gin in 
both particulars. 

Mr. Testator was in a dreadful state, for (according to his mak- 
ing out of the story) the possible consequences of what he had done 
in recklessness and hardihood, flashed upon him in their fulness for 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 127 

the first time. When they had stood gazing at one another for a 
little while, he tremulously began : 

" Sir, I am conscious that the fullest explanation, compensation, 
and restitution, are your due. They shall be yours. Allow me to 
entreat that, without temper, without even natural irritation on 
your part, we may have a little " 

"Drop of something to drink," interposed the stranger. " I am 
agreeable." 

Mr. Testator had intended to say, "a little quiet conversation," 
but with great relief of mind adopted the amendment. He pro- 
duced a decanter of gin, and was bustling about for hot water and 
sugar, when he found that his visitor had already drunk half of the 
decanter's contents. With hot water and sugar the visitor drank 
the remainder before he had been an hour in the chambers by the 
chimes of the church of St. Mary in the Strand ; and during the 
process he frequently whispered to himself, " Mine ! " 

The gin gone, and Mr. Testator wondering what was to follow^ 
it, the visitor rose and said, with increased stiffness, "At what hour 
of the morning, sir, will it be convenient ? " Mr. Testator hazarded, 
"At ten?" "Sir," said the visitor, "at ten, to the moment, I 
shall be here." He then contemplated Mr. Testator somewhat 
at leisure, and said, "God bless you ! How is your wife?" Mr. 
Testator (who never had a wife) replied with much feeling, 
"Deeply anxious, poor soul, but otherwise well." The visitor 
thereupon turned and went away, and fell twice in going down- 
stairs. From that hour he was never heard of Whether he was 
a ghost, or a spectral illusion of conscience, or a drunken man who 
had no business there, or the drunken rightful owner of the furni- 
ture, with a transitoiy gleam of memory ; whether he got safe home, 
or had no home to get to ; whether he died of liquor on the way, or 
lived in liquor ever afterwards ; he never was heard of more. This 
was the story, received with the furniture and held to be as sub- 
stantial, by its second possessor in an upper set of chambers in grim 
Lyons Inn. 

It is to be remarked of chambers in general, that they must have 
been built for chambers, to have the right kind of loneliness. You 
may make a great dwelling-house very lonely, by isolating suites of 
rooms and calling theni chambers, but you cannot make the true 
kind of loneliness. In dwelling-houses, there have been family fes- 
tivals ; children have grown in them, girls have bloomed into 
women in them, courtships and marriages have taken place in them. 
True chambers never were young, childish, maidenly; never had 
dolls in them, or rocking-horses, or christenings, or betrothals, or 
little coffins. Let Gray's Inn identify the child who first touched 



128 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

hands and hearts with Robinson Crusoe, in any one of its many 
"sets," and that child's little statue, in white marble with a golden 
inscription, shall be at its service, at my cost and charge, as a drink- 
ing fountain for the spirit, to freshen its thirsty square. Let Lin- 
coln's produce from all its houses, a twentieth of the procession 
derivable from any dwelling-house one-twentieth of its age, of fair 
young brides who married for love and hope, not settlements, and 
all the Vice-Chancellors shall thenceforward be kept in nosegays for 
nothing, on application to the writer hereof. It is not denied that 
on the terrace of the Adelphi, or in any of the streets of that sub- 
terranean-stable-haunted spot, or about Bedford-row, or James-street 
of that ilk (a grewsome place), or anywhere among the neighbour- 
hoods that have done flowering and have run to seed, you may find 
Chambers replete with the accommodations of Solitude, Closeness, 
and Darkness, where you may be as low-spirited as in the genuine 
article, and might be as easily murdered, with the placid reputation 
of having merely gone down to the sea-side. But, the many waters 
of life did run musical in those dry channels once ; — among the 
Inns, never. The only popular legend known in relation to any 
one of the dull family of Inns, is a dark Old Bailey whisper con- 
cerning Clement's, and importing how the black creature who holds 
the sun-dial there, was a negro who slew his master and built the 
dismal pile out of the contents of his strong box — for which archi- 
tectural offence alone he ought to have been condemned to live in 
it. But, what populace would waste fancy upon such a place, or 
on New Inn, Staple Inn, Barnard's Inn, or any of the shabby 
crew? 

The genuine laundress, too, is an institution not to be had in its 
entirety out of and away from the genuine Chambers. Again, it is 
not denied that you may be robbed elsewhere. Elsewhere you 
may have — for money — dishonesty, drunkenness, dirt, laziness, 
and profound incapacity. But the veritable shining-red-faced 
shameless laundress ; the true Mrs. Sweeney — in figure, colour, 
texture, and smell, like the old damp family umbrella; the tip-top 
complicated abomination of stockings, spirits, bonnet, limpness, 
looseness, and larceny ; is only to be drawn at the fountain-head. 
Mrs. Sweeney is beyond the reach of individual art. It requires 
the united efforts of several men to ensure that great result, and it 
is only developed in perfection under an Honourable Society and in 
an Inn of Court. 



THE UNCOMMEKCIAL TRAVELLER. 129 

All the Tear Round, Vol. 3, No. 72, Sept. 8, 1860. 

XV. 

nukse's stories. 

There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to 
revisit when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I 
have never been. For, my acquaintance with those spots is of such 
long standing, and has ripened into an intimacy of so affectionate a 
nature, that I take a particular interest in assuring myself that 
they are unchanged, 

I never was in Eobinson Crusoe's Island, yet I frequently return 
there. The colony he established on it soon faded away, and it is 
uninhabited by any descendants of the grave and courteous Span- 
iards, or of Will Atkins and the other mutineers, and has relapsed 
into its original condition, Not a twig of its wicker houses remains, 
its goats have long run wild again, its screaming parrots would 
darken the sun with a cloud of many flaming colours if a gun were 
fired there, no face is ever reflected in the waters of the little creek 
which Friday swam across when pursued by his two brother canni- 
bals with sharpened stomachs. After comparing notes with other 
travellers who have similarly revisited the Island and conscien- 
tiously inspected it, I have satisfied myself that it contains no ves- 
tige of Mr, Atkins's domesticity or theology, though his track on 
the memorable evening of his landing to set his captain ashore, 
when he was decoyed about and round about until it was dark, and 
his boat was stove, and his strength and spirits failed him, is yet 
plainly to be traced. So is the hill-top on which Robinson was 
struck dumb with joy when the reinstated captain pointed to the 
ship, riding within half a mile of the shore, that was to bear him 
away, in the nine-and-twentieth year of his seclusion in that lonely 
place. So is the sandy beach on which the memorable footstep was 
impressed, and w^here the savages hauled up their canoes when they 
came ashore for those dreadful public dinners, which led to a danc- 
ing worse than speech-making. So is the cave where the flaring 
eyes of the old goat made such a goblin appearance in the dark. 
So is the site of the hut where Robinson lived with the dog and 
the parrot and the cat, and where he endured those first agonies of 
solitude, which — strange to say — never involved any ghostly fan- 
cies ; a circumstance so very remarkable, that perhaps he left out 
something in writing his record? Round hundreds of such objects, 
hidden in the dense tropical foliage, the tropical sea breaks ever- 



130 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

more; and over them the tropical sky, saving in the short rainy- 
season, shines bright and cloudless. 

Neither, was I ever belated among wolves, on the borders of 
France and Spain ; nor, did I ever, when night was closing in and 
the ground was covered with snow, draw up my little company 
among some felled trees which served as a breastwork, and there 
fire a train of gunpowder so dexterously that suddenly we had three 
or four score blazing wolves illuminating the darkness around us. 
Nevertheless, I occasionally go back to that dismal region and per- 
form the feat again ; when indeed to smell the singeing and the 
frying of the wolves afire, and to see them setting one another 
alight as they rush and tumble, and to behold them rolling in the 
snow vainly attempting to put themselves out, and to hear their 
bowlings taken up by all the echoes as well as by all the unseen 
wolves within the woods, makes me tremble. 

I was never in the robbers' cave, where Gil Bias lived, but I 
often go back there and find the trap'door just as heavy to raise as 
it used to be, while that wdcked old disabled Black lies everlast- 
ingly cursing in bed. I was never in Don Quixote's study, where 
he read his books of chivalry until he rose and hacked at imaginary 
giants and then refreshed himself with great draughts of water, 
yet you couldn't move a book in it without my knowledge, or with 
my consent. I was never (thank Heaven) in company with the 
little old woman who hobbled out of the chest and told the mer- 
chant Abudah to go in search of the Talisman of Oromanes, yet I 
make it my business to know that she is well preserved and as 
intolerable as ever, I was never at the school where the boy 
Horatio Nelson got out of bed to steal the pears : not because he 
wanted any, but because every other boy was afraid : yet I have 
several times been back to this Academy, to see him let down out 
of window with a sheet. So with Damascus, and Bagdad, and 
Brobingnag (which has the curious fate of being usually misspelt 
when written), and Lilliput, andLaputa, and the Nile, and Abyssinia, 
and the Ganges, and the North Pole, and many hundreds of places 
— I was never at them, yet it is an affair of my life to keep them 
intact, and I am always going back to them. 

But, when I was in Dullborough one day, revisiting the associa- 
tions of my childhood as recorded in previous pages of th€se notes, 
my experience in this wise was made quite inconsiderable and of 
no account, by the quantity of places and people — utterly impossi- 
ble places and people, but none the less alarmingly real — that I 
found I had been introduced to by my nurse before I was six years 
old, and used to be forced to go back to at night without at all 
wanting to go. If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 131 

sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase), I suspect we 
should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we 
are forced to go back to, against our wills. 

The first diabolical character who intruded himself on my peace- 
ful youth (as I called to mind that day at DuUborough), was a 
certain Captain Murderer. This wretch must have been an ofi*- 
shoot of the Blue Beard family, but I had no suspicion of the con- 
sanguinity in those times. His warning name would seem to have 
awakened no general prejudice against him, for he was admitted 
into the best society and possessed immense wealth. Captain 
Murderer's mission was matrimony, and the gratification of a canni- 
bal appetite with tender brides. On his marriage morning, he 
always caused both sides of the way to church to be planted with 
curious flowers ; and when his bride said, " Dear Captain Mur- 
derer, I never saw flowers like these before : what are they called ? " 
he answered, " They are called Garnish for house-lamb," and laughed 
at his ferocious practical joke in a horrid manner, disquieting the 
minds of the noble bridal company, with a very sharp show of teeth, 
then displayed for the first time. He made love in a coach and 
six, and married in a coach and twelve, and all his horses were 
milk-white horses with one red spot on the back which he caused 
to be hidden by the harness. For, the spot would come there, 
though every horse was milk-white when Captain Murderer bought 
him. And the spot was young bride's blood. (To this terrific 
point I am indebted for my first personal experience of a shudder 
and cold beads on the forehead.) When Captain Murderer had 
made an end of feasting and revelry, and had dismissed the noble 
guests, and was alone with his wife on the day month after their 
marriage, it was his whimsical custom to produce a golden rolling- 
pin and a silver pie-board. Now, there was this special feature in 
the Captain's courtships, that he always asked if the young lady 
could make pie-crust ; and if she couldn't by nature or education, 
she was taught. Well. When the bride saw Captain Murderer 
produce the golden rolling-pin and silver pie-board, she remembered 
this, and turned up her laced-silk sleeves to make a pie. The Captain 
brought out a silver pie-dish of immense capacity, and the Captain 
brought out flour and butter and eggs and all things needful, except 
the inside of the pie ; of materials for the staple of the pie itself, 
the Captain brought out none. Then said the lovely bride, " Dear 
Captain Murderer, what pie is this to be?" He replied, "A meat 
pie." Then said the lovely bride, "Dear Captain Murderer, I see 
no meat." The Captain humorously retorted, "Look in the glass." 
She looked in the glass, but still she saw no meat, and then the 
Captain roared with laughter, and suddenly frowning and drawing 



132 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

his sword, bade her roll out the crust. So she rolled out the crust, 
dropping large tears upon it all the time because he was so cross, 
and when she had lined the dish with crust and had cut the crust 
all ready to fit the top, the Captain called out, " / see the meat in 
the glass ! " And the bride looked up at the glass, just in time to 
see the Captain cutting her head off; and he chopped her in pieces, 
and peppered her, and salted her, and put her in the pie, and sent 
it to the baker's, and ate it all, and picked the bones. 

Captain Murderer went on in this way, prospering exceedingly, 
until he came to choose a bride from two twin sisters, and at first 
didn't know which to choose. For, though one was fair and the 
other dark, they were both equally beautiful. But the fair twin 
loved him, and the dark twin hated him, so he chose the fair one. 
The dark twin would have prevented the marriage if she could, but 
she couldn't ; however, on the night before it, much suspecting 
Captain Murderer, she stole out and climbed his garden wall, and 
looked in at his window through a chink in the shutter, and saw 
him having his teeth filed sharp. Next day she listened all day, 
and heard him make his joke about the house-lamb. And that 
day month, he had the paste rolled out, and cut the fair twin's head 
ofi", and chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted her, 
and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it all, and 
picked the bones. 

Now, the dark twin had had her suspicions much increased by 
the filing of the Captain's teeth, and again by the house-lamb joke. 
Putting all things together when he gave out that her sister was 
dead, she divined the truth, and determined to be revenged. So, she 
went up to Captain Murderer's house, and knocked at the knocker 
and pulled at the bell, and when the Captain came to the door, 
said : "Dear Captain Murderer, marry me next, for I always loved 
you and was jealous of my sister." The Captain took it as a com- 
pliment, and made a polite answer, and the marriage was quickly 
arranged. On the night before it, the bride again climbed to his 
window, and again saw him having his teeth filed sharp. At this 
sight she laughed such a terrible laugh at the chink in the shutter, 
that the Captain's blood curdled, and he said : " I hope nothing 
has disagreed with me ! " At that, she laughed again, a still more 
terrible laugh, and the shutter was opened and search made, but 
she was nimbly gone, and there was no one. Next day they went 
to church in a coach and twelve, and were married. And that day 
month, she rolled the pie-crust out, and Captain Murderer cut her 
head off", and chopped her in pieces, and peppered her, and salted 
her, and put her in the pie, and sent it to the baker's, and ate it 
all, and picked the bones. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 133 

But before she began to roll out the paste she had taken a deadly- 
poison of a most awful character, distilled from toads' eyes and 
spiders' knees ; and Captain Murderer had hardly picked her last 
bone, when he began to swell, and to turn blue, and to be all over 
spots, and to scream. And he went on swelling and turning bluer, 
and being more all over spots and screaming, until he reached from 
floor to ceiling and from wall to wall ; and then, at one o'clock in 
the morning, he blew up with a loud explosion. At the sound of 
it, all the milk-white horses in the stables broke their halters and 
went mad, and then they galloped over everybody in Captain Mur- 
derer's house (beginning with the family blacksmith who had filed 
his teeth) until the whole were dead, and then they galloped away. 

Hundreds of times did I hear this legend of Captain Murderer, 
in my early youth, and added hundreds of times was there a men- 
tal compulsion upon me in bed, to peep in at his window as the 
dark twin peeped, and to revisit his horrible house, and look at 
him in his blue and spotty and screaming stage, as he reached from 
floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. The young woman who 
brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoy- 
ment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember — as a sort of 
introductory overture — by clawing the air with both hands, and 
uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from 
this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I 
sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and 
old enough to hear the story again just yet. But, she never spared 
me one word of it, and indeed commended the awful chalice to my 
lips as the only preservative known to science against " The Black 
Cat " — a weird and glaring-eyed supernatural Tom, who was re- 
puted to prowl about the world by night, sucking the breath of 
infancy, and who was endowed with a special thirst (as I was given 
to understand) for mine. 

This female bard — may she have been repaid my debt of obli- 
gation to her in the matter of nightmares and perspirations ! — 
reappears in my memory as the daughter of a shipwright. Her 
name was Mercy, though she had none on me. There was some- 
thing of a shipbuilding flavour in the following story. As it always 
recurs to me in a vague association with calomel pills, I believe it 
to have been reserved for dull nights when I was low with medicine. 

There was once a shipwright, and he wrought in a Government 
Yard, and his name was Chips. And his father's name before him 
was Chips, and his father's name before him was Chips, and they 
were all Chipses. And Chips the father had sold himself to the 
Devil for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton 
of copper and a rat that could speak ; and Chips the grandfather 



134 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

had sold himself to the Devil for an iron pot and a bushel of ten- 
penny nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could speak ; 
and Chips the great-grandfather had disposed of himself in the 
same direction on the same terms ; and the bargain had run in the 
family for a long long time. So, one day, when young Chips was 
at work in the Dock Slip all alone, down in the dark hold of an 
old Seventy-four that was haled up for repairs, the Devil presented 
himself, and remarked : 

" A Lemon has pips, 
And a Yard has ships, 
And 7' 11 have Chips ! " 

(I don't know why, but this fact of the Devil's expressing himself 
in rhyme was peculiarly trying to me.) Chips looked up when he 
heard the words, and there he saw the Devil with saucer eyes that 
squinted on a terrible great scale, and that struck out sparks of 
blue fire continually. And whenever he winked his eyes, showers 
of blue sparks came out, and his eyelashes made a clattering like 
flints and steels striking lights. And hanging over one of his arms 
by the handle was an iron pot, and under that arm was a bushel 
of tenpenny nails, and under his other arm was half a ton of 
copper, and sitting on one of his shoulders was a rat that could 
speak. So, the Devil said again : 

" A Lemon has pips, 
And a Yard has ships, 
And /'ll have Chips ! " 

(The invariable effect of this alarming tautology on the part of the 
Evil Spirit was to deprive me of my senses for some moments.) 
So, Chips answered never a word, but went on with his work. 
" What are you doing. Chips 1 " said the rat that could speak. " I 
am putting in new planks where you and your gang have eaten 
old away," said Chips. "But we'll eat them too," said the rat 
that could speak ; " and we'll let in the water and drown the crew, 
and we'll eat them too." Chips, being only a shipwright, and not 
a Man-of-war's man, said, "You are welcome to it." But he 
couldn't keep his eyes off the half a ton of copper or the bushel of 
tenpenny nails ; for nails and copper are a shipwright's sweethearts, 
and shipwrights will run away with them whenever they can. So, 
the Devil said, "I see what you are looking at, Chips. You had 
better strike the bargain. You know the terms. Your father 
before you was well acquainted with them, and so were your grand- 
father and great-grandfather before him." Says Chips, "I like 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 135 

the copper, and I like the nails, and I don't mind the pot, but I 
don't like the rat." Says the Devil, fiercely, " You can't have the 
metal without him — and he's, a curiosity. I'm going." Chips, 
afraid of losing the half a ton of copper and the bushel of nails, 
then said, " Give us hold ! " So, he got the copper and the nails 
and the pot and the rat that could speak, and the Devil vanished. 
Chips sold the copper, and he sold the nails, and he would have 
sold the pot ; but whenever he offered it for sale, the rat was in 
it, and the dealers dropped it, and would have nothing to say to 
the bargain. So, Chips resolved to kill the rat, and, being at work 
in the Yard one day with a great kettle of hot pitch on one side 
of him and the iron pot wdth the rat in it on the other, he turned 
the scalding pitch into the pot, and filled it full. Then, he kept 
his eye upon it till it cooled and hardened, and then he let it stand 
for twenty days, and then he heated the pitch again and turned 
it back into the kettle, and then he sank the pot in water for 
twenty days more, and then he got the smelters to put it in the 
furnace for twenty days more, and then they gave it him out, red 
hot, and looking like red-hot glass instead of iron — yet there was 
the rat in it, just the same as ever ! And the moment it caught 
his eye, it said with a jeer : 

" A Lemon has pips, 
And a Yard has ships, 
And 7' 11 have Chips ! " 

(For this Refrain I had waited since its last appearance, with inex- 
pressible horror, which now culminated.) Chips now felt certain 
in his own mind that the rat would stick to him ; the rat, answer- 
ing his thought, said, " I will — like pitch ! " 

^STow, as the rat leaped out of the pot when it had spoken, and 
made off", Chips began to hope that it wouldn't keep its word. But, 
a terrible thing happened next day. For, when dinner-time came, 
and the Dock-bell rang to strike work, he put his rule into the 
long pocket at the side of his trousers, and there he found a rat — 
not that rat, but another rat. And in his hat, he found another ; 
and in his pocket-handkerchief, another ; and in the sleeves of his 
coat, when he pulled it on to go to dinner, two more. And from 
that time he found himself so frightfully intimate with all the rats 
in the Yard, that they climbed up his legs when he was at work, 
and sat on his tools while he used them. And they could all speak 
to one another, and he understood what they said. And they got 
into his lodging, and into his bed, and into his teapot, and into his 
beer, and into his boots. And he was going to be married to a 



136 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

corn-chandler's daughter ; and when he gave her a workbox he had 
himself made for her, a rat jumped out of it ; and when he put his 
arm round her waist, a rat clung about her ; so the marriage was 
broken off, though the banns were already twice put up — which 
the parish clerk well remembers, for, as he handed the book to the 
clergyman for the second time of asking, a large fat rat ran over 
the leaf. (By this time a special cascade of rats was rolling down 
my back, and the whole of my small listening person was overrun 
with them. At intervals ever since, I have been morbidly afraid 
of my own pocket, lest my exploring hand should find a specimen 
or two of those vermin in it.) 

You may believe that all this was very terrible to Chips ; but 
even all this was not the worst. He knew besides, what the rats 
were doing, wherever they were. So, sometimes he would cry 
aloud, when he was at his club at night, " Oh I Keep the rats out 
of the convicts' burying-ground ! Don't let them do that ! " Or, 
" There's one of them at the cheese down-stairs ! " Or, " There's 
two of them smelling at the baby in the garret ! " Or, other things 
of that sort. At last, he was voted mad, and lost his work in the 
Yard, and could get no other work. But, King George wanted 
men, so before very long he got pressed for a sailor. And so he 
was taken off in a boat one evening to his ship, lying at Spithead, 
ready to sail. And so the first thing he made out in her as he got 
near her, was the figure-head of the old Seventy-four, where he 
had seen the Devil. She was called the Argonaut, and they rowed 
right under the bowsprit where the figure-head of the Argonaut, 
with a sheepskin in his hand and a blue gown on, was looking out 
to sea ; and sitting staring on his forehead was the rat who could 
speak, and his exact words were these : " Chips ahoy ! Old boy ! 
We've pretty well eat them too, and we'll drown the crew, and will 
eat them too ! " (Here I always became exceedingly faint, and 
would have asked for water, but that I was speechless.) 

The ship was bound for the Indies ; and if you don't know where 
that is, you ought to it, and angels will never love you. (Here 
I felt myself an outcast from a future state.) The ship set sail 
that very night, and she sailed, and sailed, and sailed. Chips's 
feelings were dreadful. Nothing ever equalled his terrors. No 
wonder. At last, one day he asked leave to speak to the Admiral. 
The Admiral giv' leave. Chips went down on his knees in the 
Great State Cabin. " Your Honour, unless your Honour, without 
a moment's loss of time makes sail for the nearest shore, this is a 
doomed ship, and her name is the Coffin ! " " Young man, your 
words are a madman's words." " Your Honour, no; they are nib- 
bling us away." " They ? " " Your Honour, them dreadful rats. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 137 

Dust and hollowness where solid oak ought to be ! Rats nibbling 
a grave for every man on board ! Oh ! Does your Honour love 
your Lady and your pretty children ? " " Yes, my man, to be sure." 
" Then, for God's sake, make for the nearest shore, for at this 
present moment the rats are all stopping in their work, and are all 
looking straight towards you with bare teeth, and are all saying to 
one another that you shall never, never, never, never, see your Lady 
and your children more." " My poor fellow, you are a case for the 
doctor. Sentry, take care of this man ! " 

So, he was bled and he was blistered, and he was this and that, 
for six whole days and nights. So, then he again asked leave to 
speak to the Admiral. The Admiral giv' leave. He went down 
on his knees in the Great State Cabin. " Now, Admiral, you must 
die ! You took no warning ; you must die ! The rats are never 
wrong in their calculations, and they make out that they'll be 
through, at twelve to-night. So, you must die ! — With me and 
all the rest ! " And so at twelve o'clock there was a great leak 
reported in the ship, and a torrent of water rushed in and nothing 
could stop it, and they all went down, every living soul. And 
what the rats — being water-rats — left of Chips, at last floated 
to shore, and sitting on him was an immense overgrown rat, laugh- 
ing, that dived when the corpse touched the beach and never came 
up. And there was a deal of seaweed on the remains. And if you 
get thirteen bits of seaweed, and dry them and burn them in the 
fire, they will go off like in these thirteen words as plain as plain 
can be : 

" A Lemon has pips, 

And a Yard has ships, 

And I've got Chips ! " 

The same female bard — descended, possibly, from those terrible 
old Scalds who seem to have existed for the express purpose of 
addling the brains of mankind when they begin to investigate 
languages — made a standing pretence which greatly assisted in 
forcing me back to a number of hideous places that I would by all 
means have avoided. This pretence was, that all her ghost stories 
had occurred to her own relations. Politeness towards a meritorious 
family, therefore, forbade my doubting them, and they acquired an 
air of authentication that impaired my digestive powers for life. 
There was a narrative concerning an unearthly animal foreboding- 
death, which appeared in the open street to a parlour-maid who 
" went to fetch the beer " for supper : first (as I now recall it) 
assuming the likeness of a black dog, and gradually rising on its 
hind-legs and swelling into the semblance of some quadruped 



138 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

greatly surpassing a hippopotamus : which apparition — not be- 
cause I deemed it in the least improbable, but because I felt it to 
be really too large to bear — I feebly endeavoured to explain 
away. But, on Mercy's retorting with wounded dignity that the 
parlour-maid was her own sister-in-law, I perceived there was no 
. hope, and resigned myself to this zoological phenomenon as one of 
my many pursuers. There was another narrative describing the 
apparition of a young woman who came out of a glass-case and 
haunted another young woman until the other young woman ques- 
tioned it and elicited that its bones (Lord ! To think of its being 
so particular about its bones !) were buried under the glass-case, 
whereas she required them to be interred, with every Undertaking 
solemnity up to twenty-four pound ten, in another particular place. 
This narrative I considered I had a personal interest in disproving, 
because we had glass-cases at home, and how, otherwise, was I to 
be guaranteed from the intrusion of young women requiring me to 
bury them up to twenty-four pound ten, when I had only twopence 
a wTek 1 But my remorseless nurse cut the ground from under my 
tender feet, by informing me that She was the other young woman ; 
and I couldn't say " I don't believe you ; " it was not possible. 

Such are a few of the uncommercial journeys that I was forced 
to make, against my will, when I was very young and unreasoning. 
And really, as to the latter part of them, it is not so very long ago 
— now I come to think of it — that I was asked to undertake them 
once again, with a steady countenance. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 3, No. 75, Sept. 29, 1860. 
XVI. 

ARCADIAN LONDON. 

Being in a humour for complete solitude and uninterrupted 
meditation this autumn, I have taken a lodging for six weeks in 
the most unfrequented part of England — in a word, in London. 

The retreat into which I have withdrawn myself, is Bond-street. 
From this lonely spot I make pilgrimages into the surrounding 
wilderness, and traverse extensive tracts of the Great Desert. The 
first solemn feeling of isolation overcome, the first oppressive con- 
sciousness of profound retirement conquered, I enjoy that sense of 
freedom, and feel reviving within me that latent wildness of the 
original savage, which has been (upon the whole somewhat fre- 
quently) noticed by Travellers. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 139 

My lodgings are at a hatter's — my own hatter's. After exhibit- 
ing no articles in his window for some weeks, but sea-side wide- 
awakes, shooting-caps, and a choice of rough waterproof head-gear 
for the moors and mountains, he has put upon the heads of his 
family as much of this stock as they could carry, and has taken 
them off to the Isle of Thanet. His young man alone remains — 
and remains alone — in the shop. The young man has let out the 
fire at which the irons are heated, and, saving his strong sense of 
duty, I see no reason why he should take the shutters down. 

Happily for himself and for his country, the young man is a 
Volunteer ; most happily for himself, or I think he would become 
the prey of a settled melancholy. For, to live surrounded by 
human hats, and alienated from human heads to fit them on, is 
surely a great endurance. But, the young man, sustained by prac- 
tising his exercise, and by constantly furbishing up his regulation 
plume (it is unnecessary to observe that, as a hatter, he is in a 
cock's-feather corps), is resigned, and uncomplaining. On a Satur- 
day, when he closes early and gets his Knickerbockers on, he is 
even cheerful. I am gratefully particular in this reference to him, 
because he is my companion through many peaceful hours. My 
hatter has a desk up certain steps behind his counter, enclosed like 
the clerk's desk at Church. I shut myself into this place of 
seclusion, after breakfast, and meditate. At such times, I observe 
the young man loading an imaginary rifle with the greatest pre- 
cision, and maintaining a most galHng and destructive fire upon 
the national enemy. I thank him publicly for his companionship 
and his patriotism. 

The simple character of my life, and the calm nature of the 
scenes by which I am surrounded, occasion me to rise early. I 
go forth in my slippers, and promenade the pavement. It is pas- 
toral to feel the freshness of the air in the uninhabited town, and 
to appreciate the shepherdess character of the few milkwomen who 
purvey so little milk that it would be worth nobody's while to 
adulterate it, if anybody were left to undertake the task. On the 
crowded sea-shore, the great demand for milk, combined with the 
strong local temptation of chalk, would betray itself in the lowered 
quality of the article. In Arcadian London I derive it from the 
cow. 

The Arcadian simplicity of the metropolis altogether, and the 
primitive ways into which it has fallen in this autumnal Golden 
Age, make it entirely new to me. Within a few hundred yards of 
my retreat, is the house of a friend who maintains a most sumpt- 
uous butler. I never, until yesterday, saw that butler out of 
superfine black broadcloth. LTntil yesterday, I never saw him oft' 



140 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

duty, never saw him (he is the best of butlers) with the appear- 
ance of having any mind for anything but the glory of his master 
and his master's friends. Yesterday morning, walking in my slip- 
pers near the house of which he is the prop and ornament — a 
house now a waste of shutters — I encountered that butler, also in 
his slippers, and in a shooting suit of one colour, and in a low- 
crowned straw-hat, smoking an early cigar. He felt that we had 
formerly met in another state of existence, and that we were trans- 
lated into a new sphere. Wisely and well, he passed me without 
recognition. Under his arm he carried the morning paper, and 
shortly afterwards I saw him sitting on a rail in the pleasant open 
landscape of Regent-street, perusing it at his ease under the ripen- 
ing sun. 

My landlord having taken his whole establishment to be salted 
down, I am waited on by an elderly woman labouring under a 
chronic sniff, who, at the shadowy hour of half-past nine o'clock of 
every evening, gives admittance at the street door to a meagre and 
mouldy old man whom I have never yet seen detached from a flat 
pint of beer in a pewter pot. The meagre and mouldy old man is 
her husband, and the pair have a dejected consciousness that they 
are not justified in appearing on the surface of the earth. They 
come out of some hole when London empties itself, and go in 
again when it fills. I saw them arrive on the evening when 
I myself took possession, and they arrived with the flat pint of 
beer, and their bed in a bundle. The old man is a weak old man, 
and appeared to me to get the bed down the kitchen stairs by 
tumbling down with and upon it. They make their bed in the 
lowest and remotest corner of the basement, and they smell of bed, 
and have no possession but bed : unless it be (which I rather infer 
from an under-current of flavour in them) cheese. I know their 
name, through the chance of having called the wife's attention, at 
half-past nine on the second evening of our acquaintance, to the 
circumstance of there being some one at the house door ; when she 
apologetically explained, " It's only Mr. Klem." What becomes of 
Mr. Klem all day, or when he goes out, or why, is a mystery I 
cannot penetrate ; but at half-past nine he never fails to turn up 
on the door-step with the flat pint of beer. And the pint of beer, 
flat as it is, is so much more important than himself, that it al- 
ways seems to my fancy as if it had found him drivelling in the 
street and had humanely brought him home. In making his way 
below, Mr. Klem never goes down the middle of the passage, like 
another Christian, but shuffles against the wall as if entreating me 
to take notice that he is occupying as little space as possible in the 
house ; and whenever I come upon him face to face, he backs from 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 141 

me in fascinated confusion. The most extraordinary circumstance 
I have traced in connection with this aged couple, is, that there is 
a Miss Klem, their daughter, apparently ten years older then either 
of them, who has also a bed and smells of it, and carries it about 
the earth at dusk and hides it in deserted houses. I came into 
this piece of knowledge through Mrs. Klem's beseeching me to 
sanction the sheltering of Miss Klem under that roof for a single 
night, "between her takin' care of the upper part in Pall Mall 
which the family of his back, and a 'ouse in Serjameses-street, 
which the family of leaves towng ter-morrer." I gave my gracious 
consent (having nothing that I know of to do with it), and in the 
shadowy hours Miss Klem became perceptible on the door-step, 
wrestling with a bed in a bundle. Where she made it up for 
the night I cannot positively state, but, I think, in a sink. I 
know that with the instinct of a reptile or an insect, she stowed it 
and herself away in deep obscurity. In the Klem family, I have 
noticed another remarkable gift of nature, and that is a power they 
possess of converting everything into flue. Such broken victuals 
as they take by stealth, appear (whatever the nature of the viands) 
invariably to generate flue ; and even the nightly pint of beer, in- 
stead of assimilating naturally, strikes me as breaking out in that 
form, equally on the shabby gown of Mrs. Klem, and the threadbare 
coat of her husband. 

Mrs. Klem has no idea of my name — as to Mr. Klem he has no 
idea of anything — and only knows me as her good gentleman. 
Thus, if doubtful whether I am in my room or no, Mrs. Klem taps 
at the door and says, "Is my good gentleman here ? " Or, if a 
messenger desiring to see me were consistent with my solitude, she 
would show him in with " Here is my good gentleman." I find 
this to be a generic custom. For, I meant to have observed before 
now, that in its Arcadian time all my part of London is indistinctly 
pervaded by the Klem species. They creep about with beds, and 
go to bed in miles of deserted houses. They hold no companion- 
ship except that sometimes, after dark, two of them will emerge 
from opposite houses, and meet in the middle of the road as on 
neutral ground, or will peep from adjoining houses over an inter- 
posing barrier of area railings, and compare a few reserved mistrust- 
ful notes respecting their good ladies or good gentlemen. This I 
have discovered in the course of various solitary rambles I have 
taken Northward from my retirement, along the awful perspectives 
of Wimpole-street, Harley-street, and similar frowning regions. 
Their effect would be scarcely distinguishable from that of the pri- 
meval forests, but for the Klem stragglers ; these may be dimly 
observed, when the heavy shadows faU, flitting to and fro, putting 



142 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

np the door-chain, taking in the pint of beer, lowering like phan- 
toms at the dark parlour windows, or secretly consorting under- 
ground with the dust-bin and the water-cistern. 

In the Burlington Arcade, I observe, with peculiar pleasure, a 
primitive state of manners to have superseded the baneful in- 
fluences of ultra civilisation. Nothing can surpass the innocence 
of the ladies' shoe-shops, the artificial-flower repositories, and the 
head-dress depots. They are in strange hands at this time of year 
— hands of unaccustomed persons, who are imperfectly acquainted 
with the prices of the goods, and contemplate them with unsophis- 
ticated delight and wonder. The children of these virtuous peo- 
ple exchange familiarities in the Arcade, and temper the asperity 
of the two tall beadles. Their youthful prattle blends in an un- 
wonted manner with the harmonious shade of the scene, and the 
general effect is, as of the voices of birds in a grove. In this 
happy restoration of the golden time, it has been my privilege 
even to see the bigger beadle's wife. She brought him his din- 
ner in a basin, and he ate it in his arm-chair, and afterwards fell 
asleep like a satiated child. At Mr. Truefitt's, the excellent 
hairdresser's, they are learning French to beguile the time ; and 
even the few solitaries left on guard at Mr. Atkinson's, the per- 
fumer's round the corner (generally the most inexorable gentle- 
man in London, and the most scornful of three-and-sixpence), 
condescend a little, as they drowsily bide or recall their turn for 
chasing the ebbing Neptune on the ribbed sea-sand. From 
Messrs. Hunt and Roskell's, the jewellers', all things are absent 
but the precious stones, and the gold and silver, and the soldierly 
pensioner at the door with his decorated breast. I might stand 
night and day for a month to come, in Saville-row, with my tongue 
out, yet not find a doctor to look at it for love or money. The 
dentists' instruments are rusting in their drawers, and their hor- 
rible cool parlours, where people pretend to read the Every-Day 
Book and not to be afraid, are doing penance for their grimness 
in white sheets. The light-weight of shrewd appearance, with 
one eye always shut up, as if he were eating a sharp gooseberry 
in all seasons, who usually stands at the gateway of the livery- 
stables on very little legs under a very large waistcoat, has gone 
to Doncaster. Of such undesigning aspect is his guileless yard 
now, with its gravel and scarlet beans, and the yellow Brake 
housed under a glass roof in a corner, that I almost believe I 
could not be taken in there, if I tried. In the places of business 
of the great tailors, the cheval-glasses are dim and dusty for lack 
of being looked into. Ranges of brown paper coat and waistcoat 
bodies look as funereal as if they were the hatchments of the cus- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 143 

tomers with whose names they are inscribed ; the measuring tapes 
hang idle on the wall ; the order-taker, left on the hopeless chance 
of some one looking in, yawns in the last extremity over the 
book of patterns, as if he were trying to read that entertaining 
library. The hotels in Brook-street have no one in them, and 
the staffs of servants stare disconsolately for next season out of 
all the windows. The very man who goes about like an erect 
Turtle, between two boards recommendatory of the Sixteen 
Shilling Trousers, is aware of himself as a hollow mockery, and 
eats filberts while he leans his hinder shell against a wall. 

Among these tranquillising objects, it is my delight to walk 
and meditate. Soothed by the repose around me, I wander in- 
sensibly to considerable distances, and guide myself back by the 
stars. Thus, I enjoy the contrast of a few still partially inhabited 
and busy spots where all the lights are not fled, where all the 
garlands are not dead, whence all but I have not departed. Then, 
does it appear to me that in this age three things are clamorously 
required of Man in the miscellaneous thoroughfares of the metrop- 
olis. Firstly, that he have his boots cleaned. Secondly, that he 
eat a penny ice. Thirdly, that he get himself photographed. Then 
do I speculate. What have those seam-worn artists been who 
stand at the photograph doors in Greek caps, sample in hand, 
and mysteriously salute the public — the female public with a press- 
ing tenderness — to come in and be " took " ? What did they do 
with their greasy blandishments, before the era of cheap photog- 
raphy ? Of what class were their previous victims, and how vic- 
timised ? And how did they get, and how did they pay for, that 
large collection of likenesses, all purporting to have been taken in- 
side, with the taking of none of which had that establishment any 
more to do than with the taking of Delhi ? 

But, these are small oases, and I am soon back again in metro- 
politan Arcadia. It is my impression that much of its serene 
and peaceful character is attributable to the absence of custom- 
ary Talk. How do 1 know but there may be subtle influences 
in Talk, to vex the souls of men who don't hear it ? How do I 
know but that Talk, five, ten, twenty miles off, may get into the 
air and disagree with me? If I rise from my bed, vaguely 
troubled and wearied and sick of my life, in the session of Parlia- 
ment, who shall say that my noble friend, my right reverend 
friend, my right honourable friend, my honourable friend, my 
honourable and learned friend, or my honourable and gallant 
friend, may not be responsible for that effect upon my nervous 
system? Too much Ozone in the air, I am informed and fully 
believe (though I have no idea what it is), would affect me in a 



U4 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

marvellously disagreeable way; why may not too much Talk? 
I don't see or hear the Ozone; I don't see or hear the Talk. 
And there is so much Talk ; so much too much ; such loud cry, 
and such scant supply of wool; such a deal of fleecing, and so 
little fleece ! Hence, in the Arcadian season, I find it a delicious 
triumph to walk down to deserted Westminster, and see the 
Courts shut up ; to walk a little further and see the Two Houses 
shut up ; to stand in the Abbey Yard, like the New Zealander of 
the grand English History (concerning which unfortunate man, a 
whole rookery of mares' nests is generally being discovered), and 
gloat upon the ruins of Talk. Returning to my primitive solitude 
and lying down to sleep, my grateful heart expands with the con- 
sciousness that there is no adjourned Debate, no ministerial expla- 
nation, nobody to give notice of intention to ask the noble Lord at 
the head of her Majesty's Government five-and-twenty bootless 
questions in one, no term time with legal argument, no Nisi Prius 
with eloquent appeal to British Jury ; that the air will to-morrow, 
and to-morrow, and to-morrow, remain untroubled by this super- 
abundant generating of Talk, In a minor degree it is a delicious 
triumph to me to go into the club, and see the carpets up, and the 
Bores and the other dust dispersed to the four winds. Again New 
Zealander-like, I stand on the cold hearth, and say in the solitude, 
"Here I watched Bore A 1, with voice always mysteriously low 
and head always mysteriously drooped, whispering political secrets 
into the ears of Adam's confiding children. Accursed be his mem- 
ory for ever and a day ! " 

But, I have all this time been coming to the point, that the 
happy nature of my retirement is most sweetly expressed in its 
being the abode of Love. It is, as it were, an inexpensive Agapem- 
one : nobody's speculation : everybody's profit. The one great 
result of the resumption of primitive habits, and (convertible terms) 
the not having much to do, is, the abounding of Love, 

The Klem species are incapable of the softer emotions ; probably, 
in that low nomadic race, the softer emotions have all degenerated 
into flue. But, with this exception, all the sharers of my retreat 
make love. 

I have mentioned Saville-row. We all know the Doctor's ser- 
vant. We all know what a respectable man he is, what a hard dry 
man, what a firm man, what a confidential man : how he lets us 
into the waiting-room, like a man who knows minutely what is the 
matter with us, but from Avhom the rack should not wring the 
secret. In the prosaic "season," he has distinctly the appearance 
of a man conscious of money in the savings bank, and taking his 
stand on his respectability with both feet. At that time it is as im- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 145 

possible to associate him with relaxation, or any human weakness, 
as it is to meet his eye without feeling guilty of indisposition. In 
the blest Arcadian time, how changed ! I have seen him, in a 
pepper-and-salt jacket — jacket — and drab trousers, with his arm 
round the waist of a bootmaker's housemaid, smiling in open day. 
I have seen him at the pump by the Albany, unsolicitedly pumping 
for two fair young creatures, whose figures as they bent over their 
cans, were — if I may be allowed an original expression — a model 
for the sculptor. I have seen him trying the piano in the Doctor's 
drawing-room with his forefinger, and have heard him humming 
tunes in praise of lovely woman. I have seen him seated on a fire- 
engine, and going (obviously in search of excitement) to a fire. I 
saw him, one moonlight evening when the peace and purity of our 
Arcadian west were at their height, polk with the lovely daughter 
of a cleaner of gloves, from the door-steps of his own residence, 
across Saville-row, round by Clifi'ord-street and Old Burlington- 
street, back to Burlington-gardens. Is this the Golden Age re- 
vived, or Iron London ? 

The Dentist's servant. Is that man no mystery to us, no type 
of invisible power ? The tremendous individual knows (who else 
does ?) what is done with the extracted teeth ; he knows what goes 
on in the little room where something is always being washed or 
filed ; he knows what warm spicy infusion is put into the comfort- 
able tumbler from which we rinse our wounded mouth, with a gap 
in it that feels a foot wide ; he knows whether the thing we spit 
into is a fixture communicating with the Thames, or could be cleared 
away for a dance ; he sees the horrible parlour when there are no 
patients in it, and he could reveal, if he would, what becomes of 
the Every-Day Book then. The conviction of my coward conscience 
when I see that man in a professional light, is, that he knows all 
the statistics of my teeth and gums, my double teeth, my single 
teeth, my stopped teeth, and my sound. In this Arcadian rest, I 
am fearless of him as of a harmless, powerless creature in a Scotch 
cap, who adores a young lady in a voluminous crinoline, at a neigh- 
bouring billiard-room, and whose passion would be uninfluenced if 
every one of her teeth were false. They may be. He takes them 
all on trust. 

In secluded corners of the place of my seclusion, there are little 
shops withdrawn from public curiosity, and never two together, 
where servants' perquisites are bought. The cook may dispose of 
grease at these modest and convenient marts ; the butler, of bottles ; 
the valet and lady's maid, of clothes ; most servants, indeed, of most 
things they may happen to lay hold of. I have been told that in 
sterner times loving correspondence, otherwise interdicted, may be 



146 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

maintained by letter through the agency of some of these useful 
establisliments. In the Arcadian autumn, no such device is neces- 
sary. Everybody loves, and openly and blamelessly loves. My 
landlord's young man loves the whole of one side of the way of 
Old Bond-street, and is beloved several doors up New Bond-street 
besides. I never look out of window but I see kissing of hands 
going on all around me. It is the morning custom to glide from 
shop to shop and exchange tender sentiments ; it is the evening cus- 
tom for couples to stand hand in hand at house doors, or roam, 
linked in that flowery manner, through the unpeopled streets. 
There is nothing else to do but love ; and what there is to do, is 
done. 

In unison with this pursuit, a chaste simplicity obtains in the 
domestic habits of Arcadia. Its few scattered people dine early, 
live moderately, sup socially, and sleep soundly. It is rumoured 
that the Beadles of the Arcade, from being the mortal enemies of 
boys, have signed with tears an address to Lord Shaftesbury, and 
subscribed to a ragged school. No wonder ! For, they might turn 
their heavy maces into crooks and tend sheep in the Arcade, to the 
purling of the water-carts as they give the thirsty streets much 
more to drink than they can carry. 

A happy Golden Age, and a serene tranquillity. Charming pict- 
ure, but it will fade. The iron age will return, London will come 
back to town, if I show my tongue then in Saville-row for half a 
minute I shall be prescribed for, the Doctor's man and the Den- 
tist's man will then pretend that these days of unprofessional inno- 
cence never existed. Where Mr. and Mrs. Klem and their bed will 
be at that time, passes human knowledge ; but my hatter hermit- 
age will then know them no more, nor will it then know me. 
The desk at which I have written these meditations will retribu- 
tively assist at the making out of my account, and the wheels of 
gorgeous carriages and the hoofs of high-stepping horses will crush 
the silence out of Bond-street — will grind Arcadia away, and give 
it to the elements in granite powder. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 147 

All the Year Round, Vol. 4, iV^o. 77, Oct. 13, 1860. 
XVII. 

THE ITALIAN PRISONER. 

The rising of the Italian people from under their unutterable 
wrongs, and the tardy burst of day upon them after the long long 
night of oppression that has darkened their beautiful country, have 
naturally caused my mind to dwell often of late on my own small 
wanderings in Italy. Connected with them, is a curious little 
drama, in which the character I myself sustained was so very sub- 
ordinate that I may relate its story without any fear of being sus- 
pected of self-display. It is strictly a true story. 

I am newly arrived one summer evening, in a certain small town 
on the Mediterranean. I have had my dinner at the inn, and I 
and the mosquitoes are coming out into the streets together. It 
is far from Naples ; but a bright brown plump little woman-ser- 
vant at the inn, is a Neapolitan, and is so vivaciously expert in 
pantomimic action, that in the single moment of answering my 
request to have a pair of shoes cleaned which I have left up-stairs, 
she plies imaginary brushes, and goes completely through the 
motions of polishing the shoes up, and laying them at my feet. 
I smile at the brisk little woman in perfect satisfaction with her 
briskness ; and the brisk little woman, amiably pleased with me 
because I am pleased with her, claps her hands and laughs delight- 
fully. We are in the inn yard. As the little woman's bright eyes 
sparkle on the cigarette I am smoking I make bold to offer her one ; 
she accepts it none the less merrily, because I touch a most charm- 
ing little dimple in her fat cheek, with its light paper end. 
Glancing up at the many green lattices to assure herself that the 
mistress is not looking on, the little woman then puts her two little 
dimpled arms a-kimbo, and stands on tiptoe to light her cigarette at 
mine. " And now, dear little sir," says she, puffing out smoke in 
a most innocent and cherubic manner, " keep quite straight on, 
take the first to the right, and probably you will see him standing 
at his door." 

I have a commission to "him," and I have been inquiring about 
him. I have carried the commission about Italy several months. 
Before I left England, there came to me one night a certain gener- 
ous and gentle English nobleman (he is dead in these days when 
I relate the story, and exiles have lost their best British friend), 
with this request : " Whenever you come to such a town, will you 
seek out one Giovanni Carlavero, who keeps a little wine-shop 



148 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

there, mention my name to him suddenly, and observe how it 
affects him ? " I accepted the trust, and am on my way to dis- 
discharge it. 

The sirocco has been blowing all day, and it is a hot unwhole- 
some evening with no cool sea-breeze. Mosquitoes and fire-flies 
are lively enough, but most other creatures are faint. The coquet- 
tish airs of pretty young women in the tiniest and wickedest of 
dolls' straw-hats, who lean out at opened lattice blinds, are almost 
the only airs stirring. Very ugly and haggard old women with 
distaffs, and with a grey tow upon them that looks as if they were 
spinning out their own hair (I suppose they were once pretty, too, 
but it is very difficult to believe so), sit on the footway leaning 
against house walls. Everybody who has come for water to the 
fountain, stays there, and seems incapable of any such energetic 
idea as going home. Vespers are over, though not so long but that 
I can smell the heavy resinous incense as I pass the church. No 
man seems to be at work, save the coppersmith. In an Italian 
town he is always at work, and always thumping in the deadliest 
manner. 

I keep straight on, and come in due time to the first on the 
right : a narrow dull street, where I see a well-favoured man of 
good stature and military bearing, in a great cloak, standing at a 
door. Drawing nearer to this threshold, I see it is the threshold 
of a small wine-shop ; and I can just make out, in the dim light, the 
inscription that it is kept by Giovanni Carlavero. 

I touch my hat to the figure in the cloak, and pass in, and 
draw a stool to a little table. The lamp (just such another 
as they dig out of Pompeii) is lighted, but the place is empty. 
The figure in the cloak has followed me in, and stands before me. 

" The master ? " 

" At your service, sir." 

" Please to give me a glass of the wine of the country." 

He turns to a little counter, to get it. As his striking face is 
pale, and his action is evidently that of an enfeebled man, I remark 
that I fear he has been ill. It is not much, he courteously and 
gravely answers, though bad while it lasts : the fever. 

As he sets the wine on the little table, to his manifest surprise 
I lay my hand on the back of his, look him in the face, and say in 
a low voice : " I am an Englishman, and you are acquainted with 

a friend of mine. Do you recollect ? " and I mentioned the 

name of my generous countryman. 

Instantly, he utters a loud cry, bursts into tears, and falls on 
his knees at my feet, clasping my legs in both his arms and bow- 
ing his head to the ground. 



THE UXCOMMEECIAL TRAVELLER. 149 

Some years ago, this man at my feet, whose over-fraught heart 
is heaving as if it would burst from his breast, and whose tears 
are wet upon the dress I wear, was a galley-slave in the Xorth of 
Italy. He was a political offender, having been concerned in the 
then last rising, and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. That 
he would have died in his chains, is certain, but for the circum- 
stance that the Englishman happened to visit his prison. 

It was one of the vile old prisons of Italy, and a part of it was 
below the waters of the harbour. The place of his confinement 
was an arched under-ground and under-water gallery, with a grill- 
gate at the entrance, through which it received such light and air 
as it got. Its condition was insufferably foul, and a stranger 
could hardly breathe in it, or see in it with the aid of a torch. At 
the upper end of this dungeon, and consequently in the worst posi- 
tion, as being the furthest removed from light and air, the English- 
man first beheld him, sitting on an iron bedstead to which he was 
chained by a heavy chain. His countenance impressed the Eng- 
lishman as having nothing in common with the faces of the male- 
factors with whom he was associated, and he talked with him, and 
learnt how he came to be there. 

When the Englishman emerged from the dreadful den into the 
light of day, he asked his conductor, the governor of the jail, why 
Giovanni Carlavero was put into the worst place ? 

"Because he is particularly recommended," was the stringent 
answer. 

" Eecommended, that is to say, for death?" 

"Excuse me; particularly recommended," was again the answer. 

" He has a bad tumour in his neck, no doubt occasioned by the 
hardship of his miserable life. If he continues to be neglected, and 
he remains where he is, it will kill him." 

" Excuse me, I can do nothing. He is particularly recommended." 

The Englishman was staying in that town, and he went to his 
home there ; but the figure of this man chained to the bedstead 
made it no home, and destroyed his rest and peace. He was an 
Englishman of an extraordinarily tender heart, and he could not 
bear the picture. He went back to the prison grate ; went back 
again and again, and talked to the man and cheered him. He used 
his utmost influence to get the man unchained from the bedstead, were 
it only for ever so short a time in the day, and permitted to come 
to the grate. It took a long time, but the Englishman's station, 
personal character, and steadiness of purpose, wore out opposition 
so far, and that grace was at last accorded. Through the bars, 
when he could thus get light upon the tumour, the Englishman 
lanced it, and it did well, and healed. His strong interest in the 



150 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

prisoner had greatly increased by this time, and he formed the 
desperate resolution that he would exert his utmost self-devotion 
and use his utmost efforts, to get Carlavero pardoned. 

If the prisoner had been a brigand and a murderer, if he had 
committed every non-political crime in the Newgate Calendar and 
out of it, nothing would have been easier than for a man of any 
court or priestly influence to obtain his release. As it was, noth- 
ing could have been more difiicult. Italian authorities, and Eng- 
lish authorities who had interest with them, alike assured the 
Englishman that his object was hopeless. He met with nothing 
but evasion, refusal, and ridicule. His political prisoner became "a 
joke in the place. It was especially observable that English Cir- 
cumlocution, and English Society on its travels, were as humorous 
on the subject as Circumlocution and Society may be on any sub- 
ject without loss of caste. But, the Englishman possessed (and 
proved it well in his life) a courage very uncommon among us : he 
had not the least fear of being considered a bore, in a good humane 
cause. So he went on persistently trying, and trying, and trying, 
to get Giovanni Carlavero out. That prisoner had been rigorously 
re-chained, after the tumour operation, and it was not likely that 
his miserable life could last very long. 

One day, when all the town knew about the Englishman and his 
political prisoner, there came to the Englishman, a certain sprightly 
Italian Advocate of whom he had some knowledge ; and he made 
this strange proposal. "Give me a hundred pounds to obtain 
Carlavero's release. I think I can get him a pardon, with that 
money. But I cannot tell you what I am going to do with the 
money, nor must you ever ask me the question if I suceeed, nor 
must you ever ask me for an account of the money if I fail." The 
Englishman decided to hazard the hundred pounds. He did so, 
and heard not another word of the matter. For half a year and 
more, the Advocate made no sign, and never once " took on " in 
any way, to have the subject on his mind. The Englishman was 
then obliged to change his residence to another and more famous 
town in the North of Italy. He parted from the poor prisoner 
with a sorrowful heart, as from a doomed man for whom there was 
no release but Death. 

The Englishman lived in his new place of abode another half- 
year and more, and had no tidings of the wretched prisoner. At 
length, one day, he received from the Advocate a cool concise mys- 
terious note, to this effect. "If you still wish to bestow that 
benefit upon the man in whom you were once interested, send me 
fifty pounds more, and I think it can be ensured." Now, the 
Englishman had long settled in his mind that the Advocate was a 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 151 

heartless sharper, who had preyed upon his credulity and his inter- 
est in an unfortunate sufferer. So, he sat down and wrote a dry 
answer, giving the Advocate to understand that he was wiser now 
than he had been formerly, and that no more money was extract- 
able from his pocket. 

He lived outside the city gates, some mile or two from the post- 
ofl&ce, and was accustomed to walk into the city with his letters 
and post them himself. On a lovely spring day, when the sky 
was exquisitely blue, and the sea Divinely beautiful, he took his 
ui^ual walk, carrying this letter to the Advocate in his pocket. As 
he went along, his gentle heart was much moved by the loveliness 
of the prospect, and by the thought of the slowly-dying prisoner 
chained to the bedstead, for whom the universe had no delights. 
As he drew nearer and nearer to the city where he was to post the 
letter, he became very uneasy in his mind. He debated with him- 
self, was it remotely possible, after all, that this sum of fifty 
pounds could restore the fellow-creature whom he pitied so much, 
and for whom he had striven so hard, to liberty ? He was not 
a conventionally rich Englishman — very far from that — but, 
he had a spare fifty pounds at the banker's. He resolved to 
risk it. Without doubt, God has recompensed him for the reso- 
lution. 

He went to the banker's, and got a bill for the amount, and 
enclosed it in a letter to the Advocate that I wish I could have 
seen. He simply told the Advocate that he was quite a poor man, 
and that he was sensible it might be a great weakness in him to part 
with so much money on the faith of so vague a communication ; 
but, that there it was, and that he prayed the- Advocate to make a 
good use of it. If he did otherwise no good could ever come of it, 
and it would lie heavy on his soul one day. 

Within a week, the Englishman was sitting at his breakfast, 
when he heard some suppressed sounds of agitation on the stair- 
case, and Giovanni Carlavero leaped into the room and fell upon 
his breast, a free man ! 

Conscious of having wronged the Advocate in his own thoughts, 
the Englishman wrote him an earnest and grateful letter, avowing 
the fact, and entreating him to confide by what means and through 
what agency he had succeeded so well. The Advocate returned 
for answer through the post. "There are many things, as you 
know, in this Italy of ours, that are safest and best not even spoken 
of — far less written of. We may meet some day, and then I may 
tell you what you want to know ; not here, and now." But, the 
two never did meet again. The Advocate was dead when the 
Englishman gave me my trust; and how the man had been set 



152 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

free, remained as great a mystery to the Englishman, and to the 
man himself, as it was to me. 

But, I knew this : — here was the man, this sultiy night, on his 
knees at my feet, because I was the Englishman's friend ; here were 
his tears upon my dress ; here were his sobs choking his utterance ; 
here were his kisses on my hands, because they had touched the 
hands that had worked out his release. He had no need to tell 
me it would be happiness to him to die for his benefactor ; I doubt 
if I ever saw real, sterling, fervent gratitude of soul, before or since. 

He was much watched and suspected, he said, and had h|,d 
enough to do to keep himself out of trouble. This, and his not 
having prospered in his worldly affairs, had led to his having failed 
in his usual communications to the Englishman for — as I now 
remember the period — some two or three years. But, his pros- 
pects were brighter, and his wife who had been very ill had recov- 
ered, and his fever had left him, and he had bought a little 
vineyard, and would I carry to his benefactor the first of its wine ? 
Ay, that I would (I told him with enthusiasm), and not a drop of 
it should be spilled or lost ! 

He had cautiously closed the door before speaking of himself, 
and had talked with such excess of emotion, and in a provincial 
Italian so difficult to understand, that I had more than once been 
obliged to stop him, and beg him to have compassion on me and 
be slower and calmer. By degrees he became so, and tranquilly 
walked back with me to the hotel. There, I sat down before I 
went to bed and wrote a faithful account of him to the English- 
man : which I concluded by saying that I would bring the wine 
home, against any difficulties, every drop. 

Early next morning, when I came out at the hotel door to pursue 
my journey, I found my friend waiting with one of those immense 
bottles in which the Italian peasants store their wine — a bottle 
holding some half-dozen gallons — bound round with basket-work 
for greater safety on the journey. I see him now, in the bright 
sunlight, tears of gratitude in his eyes, proudly inviting my atten- 
tion to this corpulent bottle. (At the street-corner hard by, two 
high-flavoured able-bodied monks — pretending to talk together, 
but keeping their four evil eyes upon us.) 

How the bottle had been got there, did not appear ; but the diffi- 
culty of getting it into the ramshackle vetturino carriage in which I 
was departing, was so great, and it took up so much room when it 
was got in, that I elected to sit outside. The last I saw of Giovanni 
Carlavero was his running through the town by the side of the jin- 
gling wheels, clasping my hand as I stretched it down from the box, 
charging me with a thousand last loving and dutiful messages to 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 153 

his dear patron, and finally looking in at the bottle as it reposed 
inside, with an admiration of its honourable way of travelling that 
was beyond measure delightful. 

And now, what disquiet of mind this dearly-beloved and highly- 
treasured Bottle began to cost me, no man knows. It was my pre- 
cious charge through a long tour, and, for hundreds of miles, I never 
had it off my mind by day or by night. Over bad roads — and they 
were many — I clung to it with affectionate desperation. Up 
mountains, I looked in at it and saw it helplessly tilting over on 
its back, with terror. At innumerable inn doors w^hen the weather 
was bad, I was obliged to be put into my vehicle before the Bottle 
could be got in, and was obliged to have the Bottle lifted out before 
human aid could come near me. The Imp of the same name, except 
that his associations were all evil and these associations were all good, 
would have been a less troublesome travelling companion. I might 
have served Mr. Cruikshank as a subject for a new illustration of 
the miseries of the Bottle. The National Temperance Society might 
have made a powerful Tract of me. 

The suspicions that attached to this innocent Bottle, greatly 
aggravated my difficulties. It was like the apple-pie in the child's 
book. Parma pouted at it, Modena mocked it, Tuscany tackled 
it, Naples nibbled it, Rome refused it, Austria accused it. Soldiers 
suspected it, Jesuits jobbed it. I composed a neat Oration, devel- 
oping my inoffensive intentions in connection with this Bottle, and 
delivered it in an infinity of guard-houses, at a multitude of town 
gates, and on every drawbridge, angle, and rampart, of a complete 
system of fortifications. Fifty times a day, I got down to harangue 
an infuriated soldiery about the Bottle. Through the filthy degra- 
dation of the abject and vile Roman States, I had as much difficulty 
in working my way with the Bottle, as if it had bottled up a com- 
plete system of heretical theology. In the Neapolitan country, 
where everybody was a spy, a soldier, a priest, or a lazzarone, the 
shameless beggars of all four denominations incessantly pounced on 
the Bottle and made it a pretext for extorting money from me. 
Quires — quires do I say 1 Reams — of forms illegibly printed on 
whity-brown paper were filled up about the Bottle, and it was the 
subject of more stamping and sanding than I had ever seen before. 
In consequence of which haze of sand, perhaps, it was always irreg- 
ular, and always latent with dismal penalties of going back or not 
going forward, which were only to be abated by the silver crossing 
of a base hand, poked shirtless out of a ragged uniform sleeve. 
Under all discouragements, however, I stuck to my Bottle, and held 
firm to my resolution that every drop of its contents should reach 
the Bottle's destination. 



154 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

The latter refinement cost me a separate heap of troubles on its 
own separate account. What corkscrews did I see the military- 
power bring out against that Bottle ; what gimlets, spikes, divin- 
ing rods, gauges, and unknown tests and instruments ! At some 
places, they persisted in declaring that the wine must not be passed, 
without being opened and tasted ; I, pleading to the contrary, used 
then to argue the question seated on the Bottle lest they should 
open it in spite of me. In the southern parts of Italy more violent 
shrieking, face-making, and gesticulating, greater vehemence of 
speech and countenance and action, went on about that Bottle, than 
would attend fifty murders in a northern latitude. It raised im- 
portant functionaries out of their beds, in the dead of night. I 
have known half-a-dozen military lanterns to disperse themselves 
at all points of a great sleeping Piazza, each lantern summoning 
some official creature to get up, put on his cocked-hat instantly, 
and come and stop the Bottle. It was characteristic that while 
this innocent Bottle had such immense difficulty in getting from 
little town to town, Signor Mazzini and the fiery cross were travers- 
ing Italy from end to end. 

Still, I stuck to my Bottle, like any fine old English gentleman 
all of the olden time. The more the Bottle was interfered with, 
the stauncher I became (if possible) in my first determination that 
my countryman should have it delivered to him intact, as the man 
whom he had so nobly restored to life and liberty had delivered it 
to me. If ever I had been obstinate in my days — and I may have 
been, say, once or twice — I was obstinate about the Bottle. But, 
T made it a rule always to keep a pocket full of small coin at its 
service, and never to be out of temper in its cause. Thus, I and 
the Bottle made our way. Once we had a break-down ; rather a 
bad break-down, on a steep high place with the sea below us, on a 
tempestuous evening when it blew great guns. AVe were driving 
four wild horses abreast. Southern fashion, and there was some little 
difficulty in stopping them. I was outside, and not thrown off ; 
but no words can describe my feelings when I saw the Bottle — 
travelling inside, as usual — burst the door open, and roll obesely 
out into the road. A blessed Bottle with a charmed existence, he 
took no hurt, and we repaired damage, and went on triumphant. 

A thousand representations were made to me that the Bottle 
must be left at this place, or that, and called for again. I never 
yielded to one of them, and never parted from the Bottle, on any 
pretence, consideration, threat, or entreaty. I had no faith in any 
official receipt for the Bottle, and nothing would induce me to 
accept one. These unmanageable politics at last brought me and 
the Bottle, still triumphant, to Genoa. There, I took a tender and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 155 

reluctant leave of him for a few weeks, and consigned him to a trusty 
Enghsh captain, to be conveyed to the Port of London by sea. 

While the Bottle was on his voyage to England, I read the 
Shipping Intelligence as anxiously as if I had been an underwriter. 
There was some stormy weather after I myself had got to England 
by way of Switzerland and France, and my mind greatly misgave 
me that the Bottle might be wrecked. At last to my great joy, I 
received notice of his safe arrival, and immediately went down to 
Saint Katharine's Docks, and found him in a state of honourable 
captivity in the Custom House. 

The wine was mere vinegar when I set it down before the gener- 
ous Englishman — probably it had been something like vinegar 
when I took it up from Giovanni Carlavero — but not a drop of it 
was spilled or gone. And the Englishman told me, with, much emo- 
tion in his face and voice, that he had never tasted wine that seemed 
to him so sweet and sound. And long afterwards, the Bottle graced 
his table. And the last time I saw him in this world that misses 
him, he took me aside in a crowd, to say, with his amiable smile : 
"We were talking of you only to-day at dinner, and I wished you 
had been there, for I had some Claret up in Carlavero's Bottle." 



All the Tear Round, Vol. 9, iVo. 210, 3Iaij 2, 1863. 
XVIII. 

THE CALAIS 2fIGHT-MAIL. 

It is an unsettled question with me whether I shall leave Calais 
something handsome in my will, or whether I shaU leave it my 
malediction. I hate it so much, and yet I am always so very glad 
to see it, that I am in a state of constant indecision on this subject. 

When I first made acquaintance with Calais, it was as a maun- 
dering young wretch in a clammy perspiration and dripping saline 
particles, who was conscious of no extremities but the one great 
extremity, sea-sickness — who was a mere bilious torso, with a 
mislaid headache somewhere in its stomach — who had been put 
into a horrible swing in Dover Harbour, and had tumbled giddily 
out of it on the French coast, or the Isle Man, or anywhere. 
Times have changed, and now I enter Calais self-reliant and 
rational. I know where it is beforehand, I keep a lookout for 
it, I recognise its landmarks when I see any of them, I am 
acquainted with its ways, and I know — and I can bear — its 
worst behaviour. 



156 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Malignant Calais ! Low-lying alligator, evading the eyesight 
and discouraging hope ! Dodging fiat streak, now on this bow, 
now on that, now anywhere, now everywhere, now nowhere ! In 
vain Cape Grinez, coming frankly forth into the sea, exhorts the 
failing to be stout of heart and stomach : sneaking Calais, prone 
behind its bar, invites emetically to despair. Even when it can no 
longer quite conceal itself in its muddy dock, it has an evil way of 
falling off, has Calais, which is more hopeless than its invisibility. 
The pier is all but on the bowsprit, and you think you are there 
— roll, roar, wash ! — Calais has retired miles inland, and Dover 
has burst out to look for it. It has a last dip and slide in its 
character, has Calais, to be especially commended to the infernal 
gods. Thrice accursed be that garrison-town, when it dives under 
the boat's keel, and comes up a league or two to the right, with 
the packet shivering and spluttering and staring about for it ! 

Not but what I have my animosities towards Dover. I particu- 
larly detest Dover for the self-complacency with which it goes to 
bed. It always goes to bed (when I am going to Calais) with a 
more brilliant display of lamp and candle than any other town. 
Mr. and Mrs. Birmingham, host and hostess of the Lord Warden 
Hotel, are my much esteemed friends, but they are too conceited 
about the comforts of that establishment when the Night Mail is 
starting. I know it is a good house to stay at, and I don't want 
the fact insisted upon in all its warm bright windows at such an 
hour. I know the Warden is a stationary edifice that never rolls 
or pitches, and I object to its big outline seeming to insist upon 
that circumstance, and, as it were, to come over me with it, when 
I am reeling on the deck of the boat. Beshrew the Warden like- 
wise, for obstructing that corner, and making the wind so angry as 
it rushes round. Shall I not know that it blows quite soon enough, 
without the officious Warden's interference 1 

As I wait here on board the night packet, for the South East- 
ern Train to come down with the Mail, Dover appears to me to 
be illuminated for some intensely aggravating festivity in my per- 
sonal dishonour. All its noises smack of taunting praises of the 
land, and dispraises of the gloomy sea, and of me for going on it. 
The drums upon the heights have gone to bed, or I know they 
would rattle taunts against me for having my unsteady footing on 
this slippery deck. The many gas eyes of the Marine Parade 
twinkle in an offensive manner, as if with derision. The distant 
dogs of Dover bark at me in my misshapen wrappers, as if I were 
Richard the Third. 

A screech, a bell, and two red eyes come gliding down the 
Admiralty Pier with a smoothness of motion rendered more smooth 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 157 

by the heaving of the boat. The sea makes noises against the 
pier, as if several hippopotami were lapping at it, and were pre- 
vented by circumstances over which they had no control from 
drinking peaceably. We, the boat, become violently agitated — 
rumble, hum, scream, roar, and establish an immense family wash- 
ing-day at each paddle-box. Bright patches break out in the train 
as the doors of the post-office vans are opened, and instantly stoop- 
ing figures with sacks upon their backs begin to be beheld among 
the piles, descending as it would seem in ghostly procession to Davy 
Jones's Locker. The passengers come on board ; a few shadowy 
Frenchmen, with hatboxes shaped like the stoppers of gigantic 
case-bottles; a few shadowy Germans in immense fur coats and 
boots ; a few shadowy Englishmen prepared for the worst and pre- 
tending not to expect it. I cannot disguise from my uncommercial 
mind the miserable fact that we are a body of outcasts ; that the 
attendants on us are as scant in number as may serve to get rid of 
us with the least possible delay ; that there are no night-loungers 
interested in us ; that the unwilling lamps shiver and shudder at 
us j that the sole object is to commit us to the deep and abandon 
us. Lo, the two red eyes glaring in increasing distance, and then 
the very train itself has gone to bed before we are ojff ! 

What is the moral support derived by some sea-going amateurs 
from an umbrella ? Why do certain voyagers across the Channel 
always put up that article, and hold it up with a grim and fierce te- 
nacity 1 A fellow-creature near me — whom I only know to be a fel- 
low-creature, because of his umbrella : without which he might be a 
dark bit of clifi", pier, or bulkhead — clutches that instrument with a 
desperate grasp, that will not relax until he lands at Calais. Is there 
any analogy, in certain constitutions, between keeping an umbrella 
up, and keeping the spirits up ? A hawser thrown on board with 
a flop replies " Stand by ! " " Stand by, below." " Half a turn a 
head ! " " Half a turn a head ! " " Half speed ! " " Half speed ! " 
"Port!" "Port!" "Steady!" "Steady!" "Goon!" "Goon!" 

A stout wooden wedge driven in at my right temple and out at 
my left, a floating deposit of lukewarm oil in my throat, and a 
compression of the bridge of my nose in a blunt pair of pincers, — 
these are the personal sensations by which I know we are off", and 
by which I shall continue to know it until I am on the soil of 
France. My symptoms have scarcely established themselves com- 
fortably, when two or three skating shadows that have been try- 
ing to walk or stand, get flung together, and other two or three 
shadows in tarpauling slide with them into corners and cover them 
up. Then the South Foreland lights begin to hiccup at us in a 
way that bodes no good. 



158 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

It is at about this period that my detestation of Calais knows no 
bounds. Inwardly I resolve afresh that I never will forgive that 
hated town. I have done so before, many times, but that is past. 

Let me register a vow. Implacable animosity to Calais everm 

that was an awkward sea, and the funnel seems of my opinion, for 
it gives a complaining roar. 

The wind blows stiffly from the Nor'-East, the sea runs high, we 
ship a deal of water, the night is dark and cold, and the shapeless 
passengers lie about in melancholy bundles, as if they Avere sorted 
out for the laundress ; but for my own uncommercial part I cannot 
pretend that I am much inconvenienced by any of these things. 
A general howling whistling flopping gurgling and scooping, I 
am aware of, and a general knocking about of Nature; but the 
impressions I receive are very vague. In a sweet faint temper, 
something like the smell of damaged oranges, I think I should feel 
languidly benevolent if I had time. I have not time, because I 
am under a curious compulsion to occupy myself with the Irish 
melodies. " Rich and rare were the gems she wore," is the par- 
ticular melody to which I find myself devoted. I sing it to my- 
self in the most charming manner and with the greatest expression. 
Now and then, I raise my head (I am sitting on the hardest of wet 
seats, in the most uncomfortable of wet attitudes, but I don't mind 
it,) and notice that I am a whirling shuttlecock between a fiery 
battledore of a lighthouse on the French coast and a fiery battledore 
of a lighthouse on the English coast ; but I don't notice it particu- 
larly, except to feel envenomed in my hatred of Calais. Then I go 
on again, "Rich and rare were the ge-ems she-e-e-e wore, And a 
bright gold ring on her wa-and she bo-ore. But her beauty was 
fa-a-a-a-r beyond " — I am particularly proud of my execution here, 
when I become aware of another awkward shock from the sea, and 
another protest from the funnel, and a fellow-creature at the pad- 
dle-box more audibly indisposed than I think he need be — "Her 
sparkling gems, or snow-white wand. But her beauty was 
fa-a-a-a-a-r beyond " — another awkward one here, and the fellow- 
creature with the umbrella down and picked up, "Her spa-a-rkling 
ge-ems, or her Port ! port ! steady ! steady ! snow-white fellow- 
creature at the paddle-box very selfishly audible, bump roar wash 
white wand." 

As my execution of the Irish melodies partakes of my imperfect 
perceptions of what is going on around me, so what is going on 
around me becomes something else than what it is. The stokers 
open the furnace doors below, to feed the fires, and I am again on 
the box of the old Exeter Telegraph fast coach, and that is ihe 
light of the for ever extinguished coach-lamps, and the gleam on the 



THE UNCOMMEECIAL TRAVELLER. 159 

hatches and paddle-boxes is their gleam on cottages and haystacks, 
and the monotonous noise of the engines is the steady jingle of the 
splendid team. Anon, the intermittent funnel roar of protest at 
every violent roll, becomes the regular blast of a high pressure 
engine, and I recognise the exceedingly explosive steamer in which I 
ascended the Mississippi when the American civil war was not, and 
when only its causes were. A fragment of mast on which the light 
of a lantern falls, an end of rope, and a jerking block or so, 
become suggestive of Franconi's Circus at Paris where I shall be 
this very night mayhap (for it must be morning now), and they 
dance to the self-same time and tune as the trained steed, Black 
Raven. What may be the speciality of these waves as they come 
rushing on, I cannot desert the pressing demands made upon me 
by the gems she wore, to inquire, but they are charged with some- 
thing about Robinson Crusoe, and I think it was in Yarmouth 
Roads that he first went a sea faring and was near foundering (what 
a terrific sound that word had for me when I was a boy !) in his 
first gale of wind. Still, through all this, I must ask her (who 
was she I wonder !) for the fiftieth time, and without ever stopping, 
Does she not fear to stray, So lone and lovely through this bleak 
way. And are Erin's sons so good or so cold, As not to be tempted 
by more fellow-creatures at the paddle-box or gold ? Sir Knight I 
feel not the least alarm, No son of Erin will offer me harm. For 
though they love fellow-creature with umbrella down again and 
golden store. Sir Knight they what a tremendous one love honour 
and virtue more : For though they love Stewards with a bull's eye 
bright, they'll trouble you for your ticket, sir — rough passage 
to-night ! 

I freely admit it to be a miserable piece of human weakness and 
inconsistency, but I no sooner become conscious of those last words 
from the steward than I begin to soften towards Calais. Whereas I 
have been vindictively wishing that those Calais burghers who 
came out of their town by a short cut into the History of England, 
with those fatal ropes round their necks by which they have since 
been towed into so many cartoons, had all been hanged on the spot, 
I now begin to regard them as highly respectable and virtuous 
tradesmen. Looking about me, I see the light of Cape Grinez 
well astern of the boat on the davits to leeward, and the light of 
Calais Harbour undeniably at its old tricks, but still ahead and 
shining. Sentiments of forgiveness of Calais, not to say of attach- 
ment to Calais, begin to expand my bosom. I have weak notions 
that I will stay there a day or two on my way back. A faded and 
recumbent stranger pausing in a profound reverie over the rim of a 
basin, asks me what kind of place Calais is ? I tell him (Heaven 



160 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

forgive me !) a very agreeable place indeed — rather hilly than 
otherwise. 

So strangely goes the time, and on the whole so quickly — 
though still I seem to have been on board a week — ^ that I am 
bumped rolled gurgled washed and pitched into Calais Harbour 
before her maiden smile has finally lighted her through the Green 
Isle, When blest for ever is she who relied, On entering Calais at 
the top of the tide. For we have not to land to-night down among 
those slimy timbers — covered with green hair as if it were the 
mermaids' favourite combing-place — where one crawls to the 
surface of the jetty, like a stranded shrimp, but we go steaming up 
the harbour to the Railway Station Quay. And as we go, the sea 
washes in and out among piles and planks, with dead heavy beats 
and in quite a furious manner (whereof we are proud), and the 
lamps shake in the wind, and the bells of Calais striking One 
seem to send their vibrations struggling against troubled air, as we 
have come struggling against troubled w^ater. And now, in the 
sudden relief and wiping of faces, everybody on board seems to have 
had a prodigious double-tooth out, and to be this very instant free 
of the Dentist's hands. And now we all know for the first time how 
wet and cold we are, and how salt we are ; and now I love Calais 
with my heart of hearts ! 

" Hotel Dessin ! " (but in this one case it is not a vocal cry ; it 
is but a bright lustre in the eyes of the cheery representative of that 
best of inns). " Hotel Meurice ! " " Hotel de France ! " " Hotel 
de Calais ! " " The Royal Hotel, Sir, Angaishe ouse ! " " You 
going to Parry, Sir 1 " " Your baggage, registair froo. Sir ? " 
Bless ye, my Touters, bless ye, my commissionaires, bless ye, my 
hungry-eyed mysteries in caps of a military form, who are always 
here, day or night, fair weather or foul, seeking inscrutable jobs 
which I never see you get ! Bless ye, my Custom House officers 
in green and grey ; permit me to grasp the welcome hands that 
descend into my travelling-bag, one on each side, and meet at the 
bottom to give my change of linen a peculiar shake up, as if it 
were a measure of chaff" or grain ! I have nothing to declare. 
Monsieur le Douanier, except that when I cease to breathe, Calais 
will be found written on my heart. No article liable to local duty 
have I with me. Monsieur 1' Officer de I'Octroi, unless the over- 
flowing of a breast devoted to your charming town should be in 
that wise chargeable. Ah ! see at the gangway by the twinkling 
lantern, my dearest brother and friend, he once of the Passport 
Office, he who collects the names ! May he be for ever changeless 
in his buttoned black surtout, with his note-book in his hand, and 
his tall black hat, surmounting his round smiling patient face ! 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 161 

Let us embrace, my dearest brother. I am yours a tout jamais 
— for the whole of ever. 

Calais up and doing at the railway station, and Calais down and 
dreaming in its bed ; Calais with something of " an ancient and fish- 
like smell " about it, and Calais blown and sea-washed pure ; Calais 
represented at the Buffet by savoury roast fowls, hot coffee, 
cognac, and Bordeaux ; and Calais represented everywhere by 
flitting persons with a monomania for changing money — though I 
never shall be able to understand in my present state of exist- 
ence how they live by it, but I suppose I should, if I understood 
the currency question — Calais en gros, and Calais en detail, for- 
give one who has deeply wronged you. — I was not fully aware of 
it on the other side, but I meant Dover. 

Ding, ding ! To the carriages, gentlemen the travellers. 
Ascend then, gentlemen the travellers, for Hazebroucke, Lille, 
DoLiai, Bruxelles, Arras, Amiens, and Paris ! I, humble represen- 
tative of the uncommercial interest, ascend with the rest. The 
train is light to-night, and I share my compartment with but two 
fellow-travellers ; one, a compatriot in an obsolete cravat, who thinks 
it a quite unaccountable thing that they don't keep "London time" 
on a French railway, and who is made angry by my modestly sug- 
gesting the possibility of Paris time being more in their way ; the 
other, a young priest, with a very small bird in a veiy small cage, 
who feeds the small bird with a quill, and then puts him up in the 
network above his head, where he advances tmttering, to his front 
wires, and seems to address me in an electioneering manner. The 
compatriot (who crossed in the boat, and whom I judge to be some 
person of distinction, as he was shut up, like a stately species of 
rabbit, in a private hutch on deck) and the young priest (who 
joined us at Calais) are soon asleep, and then the bird and I have 
it all to ourselves. 

A stormy night still ; a night that sweeps the wires of the elec- 
tric telegraph with a wild and fitful hand ; a night so very stormy, 
with the added storm of the train-progress through it, that when 
the Gruard comes clambering round to mark the tickets while we are 
at full speed (a really horrible performance in an express train, 
though he holds on to the open window by his elbows in the most 
deliberate manner), he stands in such a whirlwind that I grip him 
fast by the collar, and feel it next to manslaughter to let him go. 
Still, when he is gone, the small small bird remains at his front 
wires feebly twittering to me — twittering and twittering, until, 
leaning back in my place and looking at him in drowsy fascination, 
I find that he seems to jog my memory as we rush along. 

Uncommercial travels (thus the small bird) have lain in their 



162 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

idle thriftless way through all this range of swamp and dyke, as 
through many other odd places ; and about here, as you very well 
know, are the queer old stone farm-houses, approached by draw- 
bridges, and the windmills that you get at by boats. Here, are 
the lands where the women hoe and dig, paddling canoe-wise from 
field to field, and here are the cabarets and other peasant-houses 
where the stone dove-cotes in the littered yards are as strong as 
warders' towers in old castles. Here, are the long monotonous 
miles of canal, with the great Dutch-built barges garishly painted, 
and the towing girls, sometimes harnessed by the forehead, some- 
times by the girdle and the shoulders, not a pleasant sight to see. 
Scattered through this country are mighty works of Vaubajt, whom 
you know about, and regiments of such corporals as you heard of 
once upon a time, and many a blue-eyed Bebelle. Through these 
flat districts, in the shining summer days, walk those long grotesque 
files of young novices in enormous shovel hats, whom you remem- 
ber blackening the ground checkered by the avenues of leafy trees. 
And now that Hazebroucke slumbers certain kilometres ahead, 
recall the summer evening when your dusty feet strolling up from 
the station tended hap-hazard to a Fair there, where the oldest in- 
habitants were circling round and round a barrel-organ on hobby- 
horses, with the greatest gravity, and where the principal show 
in the Fair was a Religious Richardson's — literally, on its own 
announcement in great letters, Theatre Religieux. In which 
improving Temple, the dramatic representation was of " all the in- 
teresting events in the life of our Lord, from the Manger to the 
Tomb ; " the principal female character, without any reservation or 
exception, being at the moment of your arrival, engaged in trim- 
ming the external Moderators (as it was growing dusk), while the 
next principal female character took the money, and the Young 
Saint John disported himself upside down on the platform. 

Looking up at this point to confirm the small small bird in every 
particular he has mentioned, I find he has ceased to twitter, and 
has put his head under his wing. Therefore, in my different way 
I follow the good example. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 163 

All the Tear Bound, Vol. 9, iVo. 212, May 16, 1863. 
XIX. 

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF MORTALITY. 

I HAD parted from the small bird at somewhere about four 
o'clock in the morning, when he had got out at Arras, and had 
been received by two shovel hats in waiting at the station, who 
presented an appropriately ornithological and crow-like appearance. 
My compatriot and I had gone on to Paris ; my compatriot enlight- 
ening me occasionally with a long list of the enormous grievances 
of French railway travelling : every one of which, as I am a sinner, 
was perfectly new to me, though I have as much experience of 
French railways as most uncommercials. I had left him at the 
terminus (through his conviction, against all explanation and re- 
monstrance, that his baggage-ticket was his passenger-ticket), insist- 
ing in a very high temper to the functionary on duty, that in his 
OA^Ti personal identity he was four packages weighing so many 
kilogrammes — as if he had been Cassim Baba ! I had bathed 
and breakfasted, and was strolling on the bright quays. The sub- 
ject of my meditations was the question whether it is positively 
in the essence and nature of things, as a certain school of Britons 
would seem to think it, that a Capital must be ensnared and en- 
slaved before it can be made beautiful : when I lifted up my eyes 
and found that my feet, straying like my mind, had brought me to 
Notre-Dame. 

That is to say, Notre-Dame was before me, but there was a 
large open space between us. A very little while gone, I had left 
that space covered with buildings densely crowded ; and now it was 
cleared for some new wonder in the way of public Street, Place, 
Garden, Fountain, or all four. Only the obscene little Morgue, 
slinking on the brink of the river and soon to come down, was 
left there, looking mortally ashamed of itself, and supremely wicked. 
I had but glanced at this old acquaintance, when I beheld an airy- 
procession coming round in front of Notre-Dame, past the great 
hospital. It had something of a Masaniello look, with fluttering 
striped curtains in the midst of it, and it came dancing round the 
cathedral in the liveliest manner. 

I was speculating on a marriage in Blouse-life, or a Christening, 
or some other domestic festivity which I would see out, when I 
found, from the talk of a quick rush of Blouses past me, that it 
was a Body coming to the Morgue. Having never before chanced 
upon this initiation, I constituted myself a Blouse likewise, and ran 



164 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

into the Morgue with the rest. It was a very muddy day, and we 
took in a quantity of mire with us, and the procession coming in 
upon our heels brought a quantity more. The procession was in 
the highest spirits, and consisted of idlers who had come with the 
curtained litter from its starting-place, and of all the reinforcements 
it had picked up by the way. It set the litter down in the midst 
of the Morgue, and then two Custodians proclaimed aloud that we 
were all "invited" to go out. This invitation was rendered the 
more pressing, if not the more flattering, by our being shoved out, 
and the folding-gates being barred upon us. 

Those who have never seen the Morgue, may see it perfectly, by 
presenting to themselves an indifferently paved coach-house acces- 
sible from the street by a pair of folding-gates; on the left of the 
coach-house, occupying its width, any large London tailor's or linen- 
draper's plate-glass window reaching to the ground ; within the 
window, on two rows of inclined planes, what the coach-house has 
to show ; hanging above, like irregular stalactites from the roof of 
a cave, a quantity of clothes — the clothes of the dead and buried 
shows of the coach-house. 

We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custo- 
dians pull off their coats and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the 
procession came along. It looked so interestingly like business. 
Shut out in the muddy street, we now became quite ravenous to 
know all about it. Was it river, pistol, knife, love, gambling, rob- 
bery, hatred, how many stabs, how many bullets, fresh or decom- 
posed, suicide or murder? All wedged together, and all staring 
at one another with our heads thrust forward, we propounded these 
inquiries and a hundred more such. Imperceptibly, it came to be 
known that Monsieur the tall and sallow mason yonder, was ac- 
quainted with the facts. Would Monsieur the tall and sallow 
mason, surged at by a new wave of us, have the goodness to im- 
part? It was but a poor old man, passing along the street under 
one of the new buildings, on whom a stone had fallen, and who 
had tumbled dead. His age ? Another wave surged up against 
the tall and sallow mason, and our wave swept on and broke, and 
he was any age from sixty-five to ninety. 

An old man was not much : moreover, we could have wished he 
had been killed by human agency — his own, or somebody else's : 
the latter, preferable — but our comfort was, that he had nothing 
about him to lead to his identification, and that his people must 
seek him here. Perhaps they were waiting dinner for him even 
now? We liked that. Such of us as had pocket-handkerchiefs took 
a slow intense protracted wipe at our noses, and then crammed our 
handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses. Others of us who had 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 165 

no handkerchiefs administered a similar relief to our overwrought 
minds, by means of prolonged smears or wipes of our mouths on 
our sleeves. One man with a gloomy malformation of brow — a 
homicidal worker in white-lead, to judge from his blue tone of 
colour, and a certain flavour of paralysis pervading him — got his 
coat-collar between his teeth, and bit at it with an appetite. Sev- 
eral decent women arrived upon the outskirts of the crowd, and 
prepared to launch themselves into the dismal coach-house when 
opportunity should come; among them, a pretty young mother, 
pretending to bite the forefinger of her baby-boy, kept it between 
her rosy lips that it might be handy for guiding to point at the 
show. Meantime, all faces were turned towards the building, and 
we men waited with a fixed and stern resolution : — for the most 
part with folded arms. Surely, it was the only public French sight 
these uncommercial eyes had seen, at which the expectant people 
did not form en queue. But there was no such order of arrange- 
ment here ; nothing but a general determination to make a rush for 
it, and a disposition to object to some boys who had mounted on 
the two stone posts by the hinges of the gates, with the design of 
swooping in when the hinges should turn. 

Now, they turned, and we rushed ! Great pressure, and a scream 
or two from the front. Then a laugh or two, some expressions of 
disappointment, and a slackening of the pressure and subsidence of 
the struggle. — Old man not there. 

" But what would you have 1 " the Custodian reasonably argues, 
as he looks out at his little door. "Patience, patience! We make 
his toilette, gentlemen. He will be exposed presently. It is neces- 
sary to proceed according to rule. His toilette is not made all at a 
blow. He will be exposed in good time, gentlemen, in good time." 
And so retires, smoking, with a wave of his sleeveless arm towards 
the window, importing, "Entertain yourselves in the meanwhile with 
the other curiosities. Fortunately the Museum is not empty to-day." 

Who would have thought of public fickleness even at the Morgue? 
But there it was, on that occasion. Three lately popular articles 
that had been attracting greatly when the litter was first descried 
coming dancing round the corner by the great cathedral, were so 
completely deposed now, that nobody save two little girls (one 
showing them to a doll) would look at them. Yet the chief of 
the three, the article in the front row, had received jagged injury 
of the left temple; and the other two in the back row, the drowned 
two lying side by side with their heads very slightly turned towards 
each other, seemed to be comparing notes about it. Indeed, those 
two of the back row were so furtive of appearance, and so (in their 
pufi'ed way) assassinatingly knowing as to the one of the front, that 



166 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

it was hard to think the three had never come together in their 
lives, and were only chance companions after death. Whether or 
no this was the general, as it was the uncommercial, fancy, it is not 
to be disputed that the group had drawn exceedingly within ten 
minutes. Yet now, the inconstant public turned its back upon 
them, and even leaned its elbows carelessly against the bar outside 
the window and shook off the mud from its shoes, and also lent and 
borrowed lire for pipes. 

Custodian re-enters from his door, " Again once, gentlemen, you 

are invited " No further invitation necessary. Ready dash 

into the street. Toilette finished. Old man coming out. 

This time, the interest was grown too hot to admit of toleration 
of the boys on the stone posts. The homicidal white-lead worker 
made a pounce upon one boy who was hoisting himself up, and 
brought him to earth amidst general commendation. Closely 
stowed as we were, we yet formed into groups — groups of conver- 
sation, without separation from the mass — to discuss the old man. 
Rivals of the tall and sallow mason sprang into being, and here 
again was popular inconstancy. These rivals attracted audiences, 
and were greedily listened to ; and whereas they had derived their 
information solely from the tall and sallow one, officious members 
of the crowd now sought to enlighten him on their authority. 
Changed by this social experience into an iron-visaged and inveterate 
misanthrope, the mason glared at mankind, and evidently cherished 
in his breast the wish that the whole of the present company could 
change places with the deceased old man. And now listeners be- 
came inattentive, and people made a start forward at a slight sound, 
and an unholy fire kindled in the public eye, and those next the 
gates beat at them impatiently, as if they were of the cannibal 
species and hungry. 

Again the hinges creaked, and we rushed. Disorderly pressure 
for some time ensued before the uncommercial unit got figured into 
the front row of the sum. It was strange to see so much heat 
and uproar seething about one poor spare white-haired old man, 
quiet for evermore. He was calm of feature and undisfigured, as 
he lay on his back — having been struck upon the hinder part of the 
head, and thrown forward — and something like a tear or two had 
started from the closed eyes, and lay wet upon the face. The un- 
commercial interest, sated at a glance, directed itself upon the striv- 
ing crowd on either side and behind : wondering whether one might 
have guessed, from the expression of those faces merely, what kind 
of sight they were looking at. The diff'erences of expression were 
not many. There was a little pity, but not much, and that mostly 
with a selfish touch in it — as who would say, " Shall I, poor I, 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 167 

look like that, when the time comes ! " There was more of a secretly- 
brooding contemplation and curiosity, as " That man I don't like, 
and have the grudge against ; would such be his appearance, if 
some one — not to mention names — by any chance gave him an 
ugly knock ? " There was a wolfish stare at the object, in which 
the homicidal white-lead worker shone conspicuous. And there was 
a much more general, purposeless, vacant staring at it — like look- 
ing at waxwork, without a catalogue, and not knowing what to 
make of it. But all these expressions concurred in possessing the 
one underlying expression of looking at something that could not 
return a hole. The uncommercial notice had established this as 
very remarkable, when a new pressure all at once coming up from 
the street pinioned him ignominiously, and hurried him into the 
arms (now sleeved again) of the Custodian smoking at his door, and 
answering questions, between-puffs, with a certain placid meritori- 
ous air of not being proud, though high in office. And mentioning 
pride, it may be observed, by the way, that one could not well 
help investing the original sole occupant of the front row with an 
air depreciatory of the legitimate attraction of the poor old man : 
while the two in the second row seemed to exult at his superseded 
popularity. 

Pacing presently round the garden of the Tower of St. Jacques 
de la Boucherie, and presently again in front of the Hotel de Ville, 
I called to mind a certain desolate open-air Morgue that I happened 
to light upon in London, one day in the hard winter of 1861, and 
which seemed as strange to me, at the time of seeing it, as if I had 
found it in China. Towards that hour of a winter's afternoon 
when the lampHghters are beginning to light the lamps in the 
streets a little before they are wanted, because the darkness thickens 
fast and soon, I was walking in from the country on the northern 
side of the Regent's Park — hard frozen and deserted — when I 
saw an empty Hansom cab drive up to the lodge at Gloucester- 
gate, and the driver with great agitation call to the man there : 
who quickly reached a long pole from a tree, and, deftly collared 
by the driver, jumped to the step of his little seat, and so the 
Hansom rattled out at the gate, galloping over the iron-bound road. 
I followed running, though not so fast but that when I came to 
the right-hand Canal Bridge, near the cross-path to Chalk Farm, the 
Hansom was stationary, the horse was smoking hot, the long pole was 
idle on the ground, and the driver and the park-keeper were look- 
ing over the bridge parapet. Looking over too, I saw, lying on the 
towing-path with her face turned up towards us, a woman, dead a 
day or two, and under thirty, as I guessed, poorly dressed in black. 
The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the dark hair, all 



168 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

pushed back from the face, as though that had been the last action 
of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground. Dabbled all 
about her, was the water and the broken ice that had dropped 
from her dress, and had splashed as she was got out. The police- 
man who had just got her out, and the passing costermonger who 
had helped him, were standing near the body ; the latter with that 
stare at it which I have likened to being at a waxwork exhibition 
without a catalogue ; the former, looking over his stock, with pro- 
fessional stiffness and coolness, in the direction in which the bearers 
he had sent for were expected. So dreadfully forlorn, so dreadfully 
sad, so dreadfully mysterious, this spectacle of our dear sister here 
departed ! A barge came up, breaking the floating ice and the 
silence, and a woman steered it. The man with the horse that 
towed it, cared so little for the body, that the stumbling hoofs had 
been among the hair, and the tow-rope had caught and turned the 
head, before our cry of horror took him to the bridle. At which 
sound the steering woman looked up at us on the bridge, with con- 
tempt unutterable, and then looking down at the body with a sim- 
ilar expression — as if it were made in another likeness from 
herself, had been informed with other passions, had been lost by 
other chances, had had another nature dragged down to perdition 
— steered a spurning streak of mud at it, and passed on. 

A better experience, but also of the Morgue kind, in which 
chance happily made me useful in a slight degree, arose to my 
remembrance as I took my way by the Boulevard de S^bastopol to 
the brightest scenes of Paris. 

The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a 
modest young uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. 
Many suns and winds have browned me in the line, but those were 
my pale days. Having newly taken the lease of a house in a certain 
distinguished metropolitan parish — a house which then appeared 
to me to be a frightfully first-class Family Mansion, involving 
awful responsibilities — I became the prey of a Beadle. I think 
the Beadle must have seen me going in or coming out, and must 
have observed that I tottered under the weight of my grandeur. 
Or he may have been in hiding under straw when I bought my 
first horse (in the desirable stable-yard attached to the first-class 
Family Mansion), and when the vendor remarked to me, in an 
original manner, on bringing him for approval, taking his cloth off 
and smacking him, " There Sir ! There's a Orse ! " And when I 
said gallantly, " How much do you want for him ? " and when the 
vendor said, "No more than sixty guineas, from you," and when I 
said smartly, "Why not more than sixty from me?^' And when 
he said crushingly, " Because upon my soul and body he'd be con- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 169 

sidered cheap at seventy, by one who understood the subject — but 
you don't." — I say, the Beadle may have been in hiding under 
straw, when this disgrace befell me, or he may have noted that I 
was too raw and young an Atlas to carry the first-class Family 
Mansion in a knowing manner. Be this as it may, the Beadle did 
what Melancholy did to the youth in Gray's Elegy — he marked me 
for his own. And the way in which the Beadle did it, was this : 
he summoned me as a Juryman on his Coroner's Inquests. 

In my first feverish alarm I repaired " for safety and for succour " 
— like those sagacious Northern shepherds who, having had no 
previous reason whatever to believe in young Norval, very prudently 

did not originate the hazardous idea of beheving in him to a 

deep householder. This profound man informed me that the 
Beadle counted on my buying him olf ; on my bribing him not to 
summon me ; and that if I would attend an Inquest with a cheer- 
ful countenance, and profess alacrity in that branch of my countrj-'s 
service, the Beadle would be disheartened, and would give up the 
game. 

I roused my energies, and the next time the wily Beadle sum- 
moned me, I went. The Beadle was the blankest Beadle I have 
ever looked on when I answered to my name ; and his discomfiture 
gave me courage to go through with it. 

We were impannelled to inquire concerning the death of a very 
little mite of a child. It was the old miserable story. Whether 
the mother had committed the minor offence of concealing the 
birth, or whether she had committed the major ofience of killing 
the child, was the question on which we were wanted. We must 
commit her on one of the two issues. 

The Inquest came off in the parish workhouse, and I have yet a 
lively impression that I was unanimously received by my brother 
Jurymen as a brother of the utmost conceivable insignificance. 
Also, that before we began, a broker who had lately cheated me 
fearfully in the matter of a pair of card-tables, was for the utmost 
rigour of the law. I remember that we sat in a sort of board- 
room, on such very large square horse-hair chairs that I wondered 
what race of Patagonians they were made for ; and further, that 
an undertaker gave me his card when we were in the full moral 
freshness of having just been sworn, as "an inhabitant that was 
newly come into the parish, and was likely to have a young family." 
The case was then stated to us by the Coroner, and then we went 
down-stairs — led by the plotting Beadle — to view the body. 
From that day to this, the poor httle figure, on which that sound- 
ing legal appellation was bestowed, has lain in the same place and 
with the same surroundings, to my thinking. In a kind of crypt 



170 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

devoted to the warehousing of the parochial coffins, and in the 
midst of a perfect Panorama of coffins of all sizes, it was stretched 
on a box ; the mother had put it in her box — this box — almost 
as soon as it was born, and it had been presently found there. It 
had been opened, and neatly sewn up, and regarded from that 
point of view, it looked like a stuffed creature. It rested on a 
clean white cloth, with a surgical instrument or so at hand, and 
regarded from that point of view, it looked as if the cloth were 
"laid," and the Giant were coming to dinner. There was nothing 
repellant about the poor piece of innocence, and it demanded a 
mere form of looking at. So, we looked at an old pauper who 
was going about among the coffins with a foot rule, as if he were 
a case of Self-Measurement ; and we looked at one another ; and 
we said the place was well whitewashed anyhow; and then our 
conversational powers as a British Jury flagged, and the foreman 
said, "All right, gentlemen? Back again, Mr. Beadle !" 

The miserable young creature who had given birth to this child 
within a very few days, and who had cleaned the cold wet door- 
steps immediately afterwards, was brought before us when we 
resumed our horse-hair chairs, and was present during the pro- 
ceedings. She had a horse-hair chair herself, being very weak and 
ill ; and I remember how she turned to the unsympathetic nurse 
who attended her, and who might have been the figure-head of a 
pauper-ship, and how she hid her face and sobs and tears upon 
. that wooden shoulder. I remember, too, how hard her mistress 
was upon her (she was a servant-of-all-work), and with what a 
cruel pertinacity that piece of Virtue spun her thread of evidence 
double, by intertwisting it with the sternest thread of construc- 
tion. Smitten hard by the terrible low wail from the utterly 
friendless orphan girl, which never ceased during the whole in- 
quiry, I took heart to ask this witness a question or two, which 
hopefully admitted of an answer that might give a favourable turn 
to the case. She made the turn as little favourable as it could be, 
but it did some good, and the Coroner, who was nobly patient and 
humane (he was the late Mr. Wakley), cast a look of strong en- 
couragement in my direction. Then, we had the doctor who had 
made the examination, and the usual tests as to whether the child 
was born alive ; but he was a timid muddle-headed doctor, and 
got confused and contradictory, and wouldn't say this, and couldn't 
answer for that, and the immaculate broker was too much for him, 
and our side slid back again. However, I tried again, and the 
Coroner backed me again, for which I ever afterwards felt grateful 
to him as I do now to his memory ; and w^e got another favourable 
turn, out of some other witness, some member of the family with 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TEAVELLER. 171 

a strong prepossession against the sinner ; and I think we had the 
doctor back again ; and I know that the Coroner summed up for 
our side, and that I and my British brothers turned round to dis- 
cuss our verdict, and get ourselves into great difficulties with our 
large chairs and the broker. At that stage of the case I tried 
hard again, being convinced that I had cause for it ; and at last 
we found for the minor offence of only conceahng the birth ; and 
the poor desolate creature, who had been taken out during our 
deliberation, being brought in again to be told of the verdict, then 
dropped upon her knees before us, with protestations that we were 
right — protestations among the most affecting that I have ever 
heard in my life — and was carried away insensible. 

(In private conversation after this was all over, the Coroner 
showed me his reasons as a trained surgeon, for perceiving it to be 
impossible that the child could, under the most favourable circum- 
stances, have drawn many breaths, in the very doubtful case of 
its having ever breathed at all ; this, owing to the discovery of 
some foreign matter in the windpipe, quite irreconcilable with 
many moments of life.) 

When the agonised girl had made those final protestations, I 
had seen her face, and it was in unison with her distracted heart- 
broken voice, and it was very mo\ang. It certainly did not im- 
press me by any beauty that it had, and if I ever see it again in 
another world I shall only know it by the help of some new sense 
or intelligence. But it came to me in my sleep that night, and I 
selfishly dismissed it in the most efficient way I could think of. 
I caused some extra care to be taken of her in the prison, and 
counsel to be retained for her defence when she was tried at the Old 
Bailey ; and her sentence was lenient, and her history and conduct 
proved that it was right. In doing the little I did for her, I re- 
member to have had the kind help of some gentle-hearted func- 
tionary to whom I addressed myself — -but what functionary I 
have long forgotten — who I suppose was officially present at the 
Inquest. 

I regard this as a very notable uncommercial experience, because 
this good came of a Beadle. And to the best of my knowledge, 
information, and belief, it is the only good that ever did come of 
a Beadle since the first Beadle put on his cocked-hat. 



172 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

All the Year Round, Vol. 9, Ko. 215, June 6, 1863. 
XX. 

BIRTH-DAY CELEBRATIONS. 

It came into my mind that I would recall in these notes a few 
of the many hostelries I have rested at in the course of my jour- 
neys ; and, indeed, I had taken up my pen for the purpose, when 
I was baffled by an accidental circumstance. It was the having 
to leave off, to wish the owner of a certain bright face that looked 
in at my door, "many happy returns of the day." Thereupon a 
new thought came into my mind, driving its predecessor out, and 
I began to recall — instead of Inns — the birthdays that I have 
put up at, on my way to this present sheet of paper. 

I can very well remember being taken out to visit some peach- 
faced creature in a blue sash, and shoes to correspond, whose life I 
supposed to consist entirely of birthdays. Upon seed-cake, sweet 
wine, and shining presents, that glorified young person seemed to me 
to be exclusively reared. At so early a stage of my travels did I 
assist at the anniversary of her nativity (and become enamoured 
of her), that I had not yet acquired the recondite knowledge that 
a birthday is the common property of all who are born, but sup- 
posed it to be a special gift bestowed by the favouring Heavens 
on that one distinguished infant. There was no other company, 
and we sat in a shady bower — under a table, as my better (or 
worse) knowledge leads me to believe — and were regaled with 
saccharine substances and liquids, until it was time to part. A 
bitter powder was administered to me next morning, and I was 
wretched. On the whole, a pretty accurate foreshadowing of my 
more mature experiences in such wise ! 

Then came the time when, inseparable from one's own birthday, 
was a certain sense of merit, a consciousness of well-earned distinc- 
tion. When I regarded my birthday as a graceful achievement of 
my own, a monument of my perseverance, independence, and good 
sense, redounding greatly to my honour. This was at about the 
period when Olympia Squires became involved in the anniversary. 
Olympia was most beautiful (of course), and I loved her to that 
degree, that I used to be obliged to get out of my little bed in the 
night, expressly to exclaim to Solitude, " 0, Olympia Squires ! " 
Visions of Olympia, clothed entirely in sage-green, from which I infer 
a defectively educated taste on the part of her respected parents, 
who were necessarily unacquainted with the South Kensington 
Museum, still arise before me. Truth is sacred, and the vision-s 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 173 

are crowned by a shining white beaver bonnet, impossibly sugges- 
tive of a little feminine postboy. My memory presents a birthday 
when Olympia and I were taken by an unfeeling relative — some 
cruel uncle, or the like — to a slow torture called an Orrery. The 
terrible instrument was set up at the local Theatre, and I had 
expressed a profane wish in the morning that it was a Play : for 
which a serious aunt had probed my conscience deep, and my 
pocket deeper, by reclaiming a bestowed half-crown. It was a 
venerable and a shabby Orrery, at least one thousand stars and 
twenty-five comets behind the age. Nevertheless, it was awful. 
When the low-spirited gentleman with a wand said, " Ladies and 
gentlemen " (meaning particularly Olympia and me), " the lights 
are about to be put out, but there is not the slightest cause for 
alarm," it was very alarming. Then the planets and stars began. 
Sometimes they wouldn't come on, sometimes they wouldn't go off, 
sometimes they had holes in them, and mostly they didn't seem 
to be good likenesses. All this time the gentleman with the wand 
was going on in the dark (tapping away at the heavenly bodies 
between whiles, like a wearisome woodpecker), about a sphere 
revolving on its own axis eight hundred and ninety-seven thousand 
millions of times — or miles — in two hundred and sixty-three 
thousand five hundred and twenty-four millions of something elses, 
until I thought if this was a birthday it were better never to have 
been born. Olympia, also, became much depressed, and we both 
slumbered and woke cross, and still the gentleman was going on in 
the dark — whether up in the stars, or down on the stage, it would 
have been hard to make out, if it had been worth trying — cypher- 
ing away about planes of orbits, to such an infamous extent that 
Olympia, stung to madness, actually kicked me. A pretty birth- 
day spectacle, when the lights were turned up again, and all the 
schools in the town (including the National, who had come in for 
nothing, and serve them right, for they were always throwing 
stones) were discovered with exhausted countenances, screwing 
their knuckles into their eyes, or clutching their heads of hair. A 
pretty birthday speech when Dr. Sleek of the City-Free bobbed up 
his powdered head in the stage-box, and said that before this 
assembly dispersed he really must beg to express his entire approval 
of a lecture as improving, as informing, as devoid of anything that 
could call a blush into the cheek of youth, as any it had ever been 
his lot to hear delivered. A pretty birthday altogether, when 
Astronomy couldn't leave poor Small Olympia Squires and me 
alone, but must put an end to our loves ! For, we never got over 
it ; the threadbare Orrery outwore our mutual tenderness ; the man 
with the wand was too much for the boy with the bow. 



174 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

When shar I disconnect the combined smells of oranges, brown 
paper, and straw, from those other birthdays at school, when the 
coming hamper casts its shadow before, and when a week of social 
harmony — shall I add of admiring and affectionate popularity — 
led up to that Institution ? What noble sentiments were expressed 
to me in the days before the hamper, what vows of friendship were 
sworn to me, what exceedingly old knives were given me, what 
generous avowals of having been in the wrong emanated from else 
obstinate spirits once enrolled among my enemies ! The birthday 
of the potted game and guava jelly, is still made special to me by 
the noble conduct of Bully Globson. Letters from home had mys- 
teriously inquired whether I should be much surprised and disap- 
pointed if among the treasures in the coming hamper I discovered 
potted game, and guava jelly from the Western Indies. I had 
mentioned those hints in confidence to a few friends, and had prom- 
ised to give away, as I now see reason to believe, a handsome covey 
of partridges potted, and about a hundred weight of guava jelly. 
It was now that Globson, Bully no more, sought me out in the 
playground. He was a big fat boy, with a big fat head and a big 
fat fist, and at the beginning of that Half had raised such a bump 
on my forehead that I couldn't get my hat of state on, to go to 
church. He said that after an interval of cool reflection (four 
months) he now felt this blow to have been an error of judgment, 
and that he wished to apologise for the same. Not only that, but 
holding down his big head between his two big hands in order that 
I might reach it conveniently, he requested me, as an act of justice 
which would appease his awakened conscience, to raise a retributive 
bump upon it, in the presence of witnesses. This handsome pro- 
posal I modestly declined, and he then embraced me, and we walked 
away conversing. We conversed respecting the West India islands, 
and, in the pursuit of knowledge he asked me with much interest 
whether in the course of my reading I had met with any reliable 
description of the mode of manufacturing guava jelly ; or whether 
I had ever happened to taste that conserve, which he had been 
given to understand was of rare excellence. 

Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty ; and then with the wan- 
ing months came an ever augmenting sense of the dignity of twenty- 
one. Heaven knows I had nothing to " come into," save the bare 
birthday, and yet I esteemed it as a great possession. I now and 
then paved the way to my state of dignity, by beginning a proposi- 
tion with the casual words, " say that a man of twenty-one," or by 
the incidental assumption of a fact that could not sanely be disputed, 
as, " for when a fellow comes to be a man of twenty-one." I gave 
a party on the occasion. She was there. It is unnecessary to 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 175 

name Her, more particularly ; She was older than I, and had per- 
vaded every chink and crevice of my mind for three or four years. 
I had held volumes of Imaginary Conversations with her mother 
on the subject of our union, and I had written letters more in num- 
ber than Horace Walpole's, to that discreet woman, soliciting her 
daughter's hand in marriage. I had never had the remotest inten- 
tion of sending any of those letters ; but to write them, and after 
a few days tear them up, had been a sublime occupation. Some- 
times, I had begun " Honoured Madam. I think that a lady gifted 
with those powers of observation which I know you to possess, and 
endowed with those womanly sympathies with the young and ardent 
which it were more than heresy to doubt, can scarcely have failed 
to discover that I love your adorable daughter, deeply, devotedly." 
In less buoyant states of mind I had begun, "Bear with me. Dear 
Madam, bear with a daring wretch who is about to make a surpris- 
ing confession to you, wholly unanticipated by yourself, and which 
he beseeches you to commit to the flames as soon as you have be- 
come aware to what a towering height his mad ambition soars." 
At other times — periods of profound mental depression, when She 
had gone out to balls where I was not — the draft took the affect- 
ing form of a paper to be left on my table after my departure to 
the confines of the globe. As thus : " For Mrs. Onowenever, these 
lines when the hand that traces them shall be far away. I could 
not bear the daily torture of hopelessly loving the dear one whom 
I will not name. Broiling on the coast of Africa, or congealing on 
the shores of Greenland, I am far far better there than here," (In 
this sentiment my cooler judgment perceives that the family of the 
beloved object would have most completely concurred.) " If I ever 
emerge from obscurity, and my name is ever heralded by Fame, it 
will be for her dear sake. If I ever amass Gold, it will be to pour 
it at her feet. Should I on the other hand become the prey of 

Ravens " I doubt if I ever quite made up my mind what 

was to be done in that affecting case ; I tried " then it is better so ; " 
but not feeling convinced that it would be better so, I vacillated 
between leaving all else blank, which looked expressive and bleak, 
or winding up with " Farewell ! " 

This fictitious correspondence of mine is to blame for the fore- 
going digression. I was about to pursue the statement that on 
my twenty-first birthday I gave a party, and She was there. It 
was a beautiful party. There was not a single animate or inani- 
mate object connected with it (except the company and myself) 
that I had ever seen before. Everthing was hired, and the mer- 
cenaries in attendance were profound strangers to me. Behind a 
door, in the crumby part of the night when wine-glasses were to be 



176 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

found in unexpected spots, I spoke to Her — spoke out to Her. 
What passed, I cannot as a man of honour reveal. She was all 
angelical gentleness, but a word was mentioned — a short and 
dreadful word of three letters, beginning with a B — which, as I 
remarked at the moment, ''scorched my brain." She went away 
soon afterwards, and when the hollow throng (though to be sure it 
was no fault of theirs) dispersed, I issued forth, with a dissipated 
scorner, and, as I mentioned expressly to him, "sought oblivion." 
It was found, with a dreadful headache in it, but it didn't last ; 
for, in the shaming light of next day's noon, I raised my heavy 
head in bed, looking back to the birthdays behind me, and tracking 
the circle by which I had got round, after all, to the bitter powder 
and the wretchedness again. 

This reactionary powder (taken so largely by the human race 
that I am inclined to regard it as the Universal Medicine once 
sought for in Laboratories) is capable of being made up in another 
form for birthday use. Anybody's long-lost brother will do ill to 
turn up on a birthday. If I had a long-lost brother I should know 
beforehand that he would prove a tremendous fraternal failure if 
he appointed to rush into my arms on my birthday. The first 
Magic Lantern I ever saw, was secretly and elaborately planned to 
be the great effect of a very juvenile birthday ; but it wouldn't act, 
and its images were dim. My experience of adult birthday Magic 
Lanterns may possibly have been unfortunate, but has certainly 
been similar. I have an illustrative birthday in my eye : a birth- 
day of ray friend Flipfield, whose birthdays had long been remark- 
able as social successes. There had been nothing set or formal 
about them ; Flipfield having been accustomed merely to say, two 
or three days before, "Don't forget to come and dine, old boy, 
according to custom ; " — I don't know what he said to the ladies 
he invited, but I may safely assume it not to have been " old girl." 
Those were delightful gatherings, and were enjoyed by all partici- 
pators. In an evil hour, a long-lost brother of Flipfield's came to 
light in foreign parts. Where he had been hidden, or what he had 
been doing, I don't know, for Flipfield vaguely informed me that 
he had turned up "on the banks of the Ganges" — speaking of 
him as if he had been washed ashore. The Long-lost was coming 
home, and Flipfield made an unfortunate calculation, based on the 
well-known regularity of the P. and 0. Steamers, that matters 
might be so contrived as that the Long-lost should appear in the 
nick of time on his (Flipfield's) birthday. Delicacy commanded 
that I should repress the gloomy anticipations with which my soul 
became fraught when I heard of this plan. The fatal day arrived, 
and we assembled in force. Mrs. Flipfield senior formed an inter- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 177 

esting feature in the group, with a blue-veined miniature of the 
late Mr. Flipfield round her neck, in an oval, resembling a tart from 
the pastrycook's : his hair powdered, and the bright buttons on his 
coat, evidently very like. She was accompanied by Miss Flipfield, 
the eldest of her numerous family, who held her pocket-handker- 
chief to her bosom in a majestic manner, and spoke to all of us 
(none of us had ever seen her before), in pious and condoning tones, 
of all the quarrels that had taken place in the family, from her 
infancy — which must have been a long time ago — down to that 
hour. The Long-lost did not appear. Dinner, half an hour later 
than usual, was announced, and still no Long-lost. We sat down 
to table. The knife and fork of the Long-lost made a vacuum in 
Nature, and when the champagne came round for the first time, 
Flipfield gave him up for the day, and had them removed. It was 
then that the Long-lost gained the height of his popularity with 
the company ; for my o\\ti part, I felt convinced that I loved him 
dearly. Flipfield's dinners are perfect, and he is the easiest and 
best of entertainers. Dinner went on brilliantly, and the more the 
Long-lost didn't come, the more comfortable we grew, and the more 
highly we thought of him. Flipfield's own man (who has a regard 
for me) was in the act of struggling with an ignorant stipendiary, 
to wrest from him the wooden leg of a Guinea-fowl which he was 
pressing on my acceptance, and to substitute a slice of the breast, 
when a ringing at the door-bell suspended the strife. I looked 
round me, and perceived the sudden pallor which I knew my own 
visage, revealed, reflected in the faces of the company. Flipfield 
hurriedly excused himself, went out, was absent for about a minute 
or two, and then re-entered with the Long-lost. 

I beg to say distinctly that if the stranger had brought Mont 
Blanc with him, or had come attended by a retinue of eternal snows, 
he could not have chilled the circle to the marrow in a more effi- 
cient manner. Embodied Failure sat enthroned upon the Long- 
lost's brow, and pervaded him to his Long-lost boots. In vain 
Mrs. Flipfield senior, opening her arms, exclaimed, "My Tom!" 
and pressed his nose against the counterfeit presentment of his 
other parent. In vain Miss Flipfield, in the first transports of 
this reunion, showed him a dint upon her maidenly cheek, and asked 
him if he remembered when he did that with the bellows ? We, the 
bystanders, were overcome, but overcome by the palpable, undisguis- 
able, utter, and total break-down of the Long-lost. Nothing he could 
have done would have set him right with us but his instant return 
to the Ganges. In the very same moments it became established 
that the feeling was reciprocal, and that the Long-lost detested us. 
When a friend of the family (not myself, upon my honour), wish- 



178 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLEK. 

ing to set things going again, asked him, while he partook of soup — 
asked him with an amiability of intention beyond all praise, but with 
a weakness of execution open to defeat — what kind of river he 
considered the Ganges, the Long-lost, scowling at the friend of the 
family over his spoon, as one of an abhorrent race, replied, " Why 
a river of water, I suppose," and spooned his soup into himself 
with a malignancy of hand and eye that blighted the amiable ques- 
tioner. Not an opinion could be elicited from the Long-lost, in 
unison with the sentiments of any individual present. He con- 
tradicted Flipfield dead, before he had eaten his salmon. He had 
no idea — or affected to have no idea — that it was his brother's 
birthday, and on the communication of that interesting fact to him, 
merely wanted to make him out four years older than he was. He 
was an antipathetical being, with a peculiar power and gift of 
treading on everybody's tenderest place. They talk in America of 
a man's "Platform." I should describe the Platform of the Long- 
lost as a Platform composed of other people's corns, on which he 
had stumped his way, with all his might and main, to his present 
position. It is neeclless to add that Flipfield's great birthday went 
by the board, and that he was a wreck when I pretended at part- 
ing to wish him many happy returns of it. 

There is another class of birthdays at which I have so frequently 
assisted, that I may assume such birthdays to be pretty well known 
to the human race. My friend Mayday's birthday is an example. 
The guests have no knowledge of one another except on that one 
day in the year, and are annually terrified for a week by thp pros- 
pect of meeting one another again. There is a fiction among us 
that we have uncommon reasons for being particularly lively and 
spirited on the occasion, whereas deep despondency is no phrase 
for the expression of our feelings. But the wonderful feature of 
the case is, that we are in tacit accordance to avoid the subject — 
to keep it as far off" as possible, as long as possible — and to talk 
about anything else, rather than the joyful event. I may even go 
so far as to assert that there is a dumb compact among us that we 
will pretend that it is not Mayday's birthday. A mysterious and 
gloomy Being, who is said to have gone to school with Mayday, 
and who is so lank and lean that he seriously impugns the Dietary 
of the establishment at which they were jointly educated, always 
leads us, as I may say, to the block, by laying his grisly hand on 
a decanter and begging us to fill our glasses. The devices and 
pretences that I have seen put in practice to defer the fatal moment, 
and to interpose between this man and his purpose, are innumerable. 
I have known desperate guests, when they saw the grisly hand 
approaching the decanter, wildly to begin, without any antecedent 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 179 

whatsoever, "That reminds me "and to plunge into long 

stories. When at last the hand and the decanter come together, 
a shudder, a palpable perceptible shudder, goes round the table. 
We receive the reminder that it is Mayday's birthday, as if it were 
the anniversary of some profound disgrace he had undergone, and 
we sought to comfort him. And when we have drunk Mayday's 
health, and wished him many happy returns, we are seized for some 
moments with a ghastly blitheness, an unnatural levity, as if we 
were in the first flushed reaction of having undergone a surgical 
operation. 

Birthdays of this species have a public as well as a private phase. 
My "boyhood's home," Dullborough, presents a case in point. 
An Immortal Somebody was wanted in Dullborough, to dimple for 
a day the stagnant face of the waters ; he was rather wanted by 
Dullborough generally, and much wanted by the principal hotel- 
keeper. The County history was looked up for a locally Immortal 
Somebody, but the registered Dullborough worthies were all No- 
bodies. In this state of things, it is hardly necessary to record that 
Dullborough did what every man does when he wants to write a 
book or deliver a lecture, and is provided with all the materials 
except a subject. It fell back upon Shakespeare. 

No sooner was it resolved to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday in 
Dullborough, than the popularity of the immortal bard became 
surprising. You might have supposed the first edition of his 
works to have been published last w^eek, and enthusiastic Dullbor- 
ough to have got half through them. (I doubt, by the way, 
whether it had ever done half that, but this is a private opinion.) 
A young gentleman with a sonnet, the retention of which for two 
years had enfeebled his mind and undermined his knees, got the 
sonnet into the Dullborough Warden, and gained flesh. Portraits 
of Shakespeare broke out in the bookshop windows, and our prin- 
cipal artist painted a large original portrait in oils for the decora- 
tion of the dining-room. It was not in the least like any of the 
other portraits, and was exceedingly admired, the head being much 
swollen. At the Institution, the Debating Society discussed the 
new question, Was there sufiicient ground for supposing that the 
Immortal Shakespeare ever stole deer ? This was indignantly de- 
cided by an overwhelming majority in the negative ; indeed, there 
was but one vote on the Poaching side, and that was the vote of 
the orator who had undertaken to advocate it, and who became 
quite an obnoxious character — particularly to the Dullborough 
" roughs," who were about as well informed on the matter as most 
other people. Distinguished speakers were invited down, and 
very nearly came (but not quite). Subscriptions were opened, and 



180 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

committees sat, and it would have been far from a popular meas- 
ure in the height of the excitement, to have told Dullborough that 
it wasn't Stratford-upon-Avon. Yet, after all these preparations, 
when the great festivity took place, and the portrait, elevated 
aloft, surveyed the company as if it were in danger of springing a 
mine of intellect and blowing itself up, it did undoubtedly happen, 
according to the inscrutable mysteries of things, that nobody could 
be induced, not to say to touch upon Shakespeare, but to come 
within a mile of him, until the crack speaker of Dullborough rose 
to propose the immortal memory. Which he did with the perplex- 
ing and astonishing result that before he had repeated the great 
name half-a-dozen times, or had been upon his legs as many min- 
utes, he was assailed with a general shout of "Question." 



All the Year Bound, Vol. 9, JSfo. 217, June 20, 1863. 
XXI. 

THE SHORT-TIMERS. 

" Within so many yards of this Covent-garden lodging of mine, 
as within so many yards of Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul's Cathe- 
dral, the Houses of Parliament, the Prisons, the Courts of Justice, 
all the Institutions that govern the land, I can find — must find, 
whether I will or no — in the open streets, shameful instances of 
neglect of children, intolerable toleration of the engenderment of 
paupers, idlers, thieves, races of wretched and destructive cripples 
both in body and mind, a misery to themselves, a misery to the 
community, a disgrace to civilisation, and an outrage on Christian- 
ity. I know it to be a fact as easy of demonstration as any sum 
in any of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the State would 
begin its work and duty at the beginning, and would with the 
strong hand take those children out of the streets, while they are 
yet children, and wisely train them, it would make them a part 
of England's glory, not its shame — of England's strength, not its 
weakness — would raise good soldiers and sailors, and good citizens, 
and many great men, out of the seeds of its criminal population. 
Yet I go on bearing with the enormity as if it were nothing, and 
I go on reading the Parliamentary Debates as if they were some- 
thing, and I concern myself far more about one railway-bridge across 
a public thoroughfare, than about a dozen generations of scrofula, 
ignorance, wickedness, prostitution, poverty, and felony. I can slip 
out at my door, in the small hours after any midnight, and, in one 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 181 

circuit of the purlieus of Covent-garden Market, can behold a state 
of infancy and youth, as vile as if a Bourbon sat upon the English 
throne; a great police force looking on with authority to do no 
more than worry and hunt the dreadful vermin into corners, and 
there leave them. Within the length of a few streets I can find a 
workhouse, mismanaged with that dull short-sighted obstinacy that 
its greatest opportunities as to the children it receives are lost, and 
yet not a farthing saved to any one. But the wheel goes round, 
and round, and round ; and because it goes round — so I am told 
by the politest authorities — it goes well." 

Thus I reflected, one day in the Whitsun week last past, as I 
floated down the Thames among the bridges, looking — not inap- 
propriately — at the drags that were hanging up at certain dirty 
stairs to hook the drowned out, and at the numerous conveniences 
provided to facilitate their tumbling in. My object in that uncom- 
mercial journey called up another train of thought, and it ran as 
follows : 

"When I was at school, one of seventy boys, I wonder by what 
secret understanding our attention began to wander when we had 
pored over our books for some hours. I wonder by what ingenuity 
we brought on that confused state of mind when sense became non- 
sense, when figures wouldn't work, when dead languages wouldn't 
construe, when live languages wouldn't be spoken, when memory 
wouldn't come, when dulness and vacancy wouldn't go. I cannot 
remember that we ever conspired to be sleepy after dinner, or that 
we ever particularly wanted to be stupid, and to have flushed faces 
and hot beating heads, or to find blank hopelessness and obscurity 
this afternoon in what would become perfectly clear and bright in 
the freshness of to-morrow morning. We suffered for these things, 
and they made us miserable enough. Neither do I remember that 
we ever bound ourselves by any secret oath or other solemn obliga- 
tion, to find the seats getting too hard to be sat upon after a 
certain time ; or to have intolerable twitches in our legs, rendering 
us aggressive and malicious with those members ; or to be troubled 
with a similar uneasiness in our elbows, attended with fistic con- 
sequences to our neighbours ; or to carry two pounds of lead in the 
chest, four pounds in the head, and several active blue-bottles in 
each ear. Yet, for certain, we suffered under those distresses, and 
were always charged at for labouring under them, as if we had 
brought them on, of our own deliberate act and deed. As to the 
mental portion of them being my own fault in my own case — I 
should like to ask any well-trained and experienced teacher, not to 
say psychologist. And as to the physical portion — I should like 
to ask Peofessor Owen." 



182 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

It happened that I had a small bundle of papers with me, on 
what is called " The Half-Time System " in schools. Referring to 
one of those papers I found that the indefatigable Mr. Chadwick 
had been beforehand with me, and had already asked Professor 
Owen : who had handsomely replied that I was not to blame, but 
that, being troubled with a skeleton, and having been constituted 
according to certain natural laws, I and my skeleton were unfortu- 
nately bound by those laws — even in school — and had comported 
ourselves accordingly. Much comforted by the good Professor's 
being on my side, I read on to discover whether the indefatigable 
Mr. Chad wick had taken up the mental part of my afflictions. I 
found that he had, and that he had gained on my behalf, Sir Ben- 
jamin Brodie, Sir David Wilkie, Sir Walter Scott, and the 
common sense of mankind. For which I beg Mr. Chadwick, if 
this should meet his eye, to accept my warm acknowledgments. 

Up to that time I had retained a misgiving that the seventy 
unfortunates of whom I was one, must have been, without knowing 
it, leagued together by the spirit of evil in a sort of perpetual Guy 
Fawkes Plot, to grope about in vaults with dark lanterns after a 
certain period of continuous study. But now the misgiving van- 
ished, and I floated on with a quieted mind to see the Half-Time 
System in action. For that was the purpose of my journey, both 
by steamboat on the Thames, and by very dirty railway on the 
shore. To which last institution, I beg to recommend the legal 
use of coke as engine-fuel, rather than the illegal use of coal ; the 
recommendation is quite disinterested, for I was most liberally 
supplied with small coal on the journey, for which no charge was 
made. I had not only my eyes, nose, and ears filled, but my hat, 
and all my pockets, and my pocket-book, and my watch. 

The y.D.S.C.R.C. (or Very Dirty and Small Coal Railway 
Company) delivered me close to my destination, and I soon found 
the Half-Time System established in spacious premises, and freely 
placed at my convenience and disposal. 

What would I see first of the Half-Time System? I chose 
Military Drill. " Atten — tion ! " Instantly a hundred boys stood 
forth in the paved yard as one boy ; bright, quick, eager, steady, 
watchful for the look of command, instant and ready for the word. 
Not only was there complete precision — complete accord to the 
eye and to the ear — but an alertness in the doing of the thing 
which deprived it, curiously, of its monotonous or mechanical char- 
acter. There was perfect uniformity, and yet an individual spirit 
and emulation. No spectator could doubt that the boys hked it. 
With non-commissioned officers varying from a yard to a yard and 
a half high, the result could not possibly have been attained other- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 183 

■wise. They marched, and counter-marched, and formed in line and 
square, and company, and single file and double file, and performed 
a variety of evolutions ; all most admirably. In respect of an air 
of enjoyable understanding of what they were about, which seems 
to be forbidden to English soldiers, the boys might have been small 
French troops. When they were dismissed and the broadsword 
exercise, limited to a much smaller number, succeeded, the boys 
who had no part in that new drill, either looked on attentively, or 
disported themselves in a gymnasium hard by. The steadiness of 
the broadsword boys on their short legs, and the firmness with 
which they sustained the different positions, was truly remarkable. 

The broadsword exercise over, suddenly there was great excite- 
ment and a rush. Naval Drill ! 

In the corner of the ground stood a decked mimic ship, with real 
masts, yards, and sails — mainmast seventy feet high. At the 
word of command from the Skipper of this ship — a mahogany- 
faced Old Salt, with the indispensable quid in his cheek, the true 
nautical roll, and all wonderfully complete — the rigging was cov- 
ered with a swarm of boys : one, the first to spring into the shrouds, 
outstripping all the others, and resting on the truck of the main- 
topmast in no time. 

And now we stood out to sea, in a most amazing manner ; the 
Skipper himself, the whole crew, the Uncommercial, and all hands 
present, implicitly believing that there was not a moment to lose, 
that the wind had that instant chopped round and sprung up 
fair, and that we were away on a voyage round the world. Get 
all sail upon her ! With a will, my lads ! Lay out upon the 
main-yard there ! Look alive at the weather earring ! Cheery, 
my boys ! Let go the sheet, now ! Stand by at the braces, you ! 
With a will, aloft there ! Belay, starboard watch ! Fifer ! Come 
aft, fifer, and give 'em a tune ! Forthwith, springs up fifer, fife in 
hand — smallest boy ever seen — big lump on temple, having lately 
fallen down on a paving-stone — gives 'em a tune with all his 
might and main. Hooroar, fifer ! With a will, my lads ! Tip 
'em a livelier one, fifer ! Fifer tips 'em a livelier one, and excite- 
ment increases. Shake 'em out, my lads ! Well done ! There 
you have her ! Pretty, pretty ! Every rag upon her she can carry, 
wind right astarn, and ship cutting through the water fifteen knots 
an hour ! 

At this favourable moment of her voyage, I gave the alarm " A 
man overboard ! " (on the gravel), but he was immediately recov- 
ered, none the worse. Presently, I observed the Skipper over- 
board, but forebore to mention it, as he seemed in no wise discon- 
certed by the accident. Indeed, I soon came to regard the Skipper 



184 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

as an amphibious creature, for he was so perpetually plunging over- 
board to look up at the hands aloft, that he was oftener in the 
bosom of the ocean than on deck. His pride in his crew on those 
occasions was delightful, and the conventional unintelligibility of 
his orders in the ears of uncommercial landlubbers and loblolly 
boys, though they were always intelligible to the crew, was hardly 
less pleasant. But we couldn't expect to go on in this way for 
ever ; dirty weather came on, and then worse weather, and when 
we least expected it we got into tremendous difficulties. Screw 
loose in the chart perhaps — something certainly wrong somewhere 
— but here we were with breakers ahead, my lads, driving head 
on, slap on a lee shore ! The Skipper broached this terrific an- 
nouncement in such great agitation, that the small fifer, not fifing 
now, but standing looking on near the wheel with his fife under his 
arm, seemed for the moment quite unboyed, though he speedily 
recovered his presence of mind. In the trying circumstances that 
ensued, the Skipper and the crew proved worthy of one another. 
The Skipper got dreadfully hoarse, but otherwise was master of 
the situation. The man at the wheel did wonders ; all hands, 
(except the fifer) were turned up to wear ship ; and I observed the 
fifer, when we were at our greatest extemity, to refer to some docu- 
ment in his waistcoat-pocket, which I conceived to be his will. I 
think she struck. I was not myself conscious of any collision, but 
I saw the Skipper so very often washed overboard and back again, 
that I could only impute it to the beating of the ship. I am not 
enough of a seaman to describe the manoeuvres by which we were 
saved, but they made the Skipper very hot (French polishing his 
mahogany face) and the crew very nimble, and succeeded to a mar- 
vel ; for, within a few minutes of the first alarm, we had wore ship 
and got her ofi", and were all a-tauto — which I felt very grateful 
for : not that I knew what it was, but that I perceived that we 
had not been all a-tauto lately. Land now appeared on our weather- 
bow, and we shaped our course for it, having the wind abeam, and 
frequently changing the man at the helm, in order that every man 
might have his spell. We worked into harbour under prosperous 
circumstances, and furled our sails, and squared our yards, and 
made all ship-shape and handsome, and so our voyage ended. 
When I complimented the Skipper at parting on his exertions and 
those of his gallant crew, he informed me that the latter were pro- 
vided for the worse, all hands being taught to swim and dive ; and 
he added that the able seaman at the main-topmast truck especially, 
could dive as deep as he could go high. 

The next adventure that befell me in my visit to the Short- 
Timers, was the sudden apparition of a military baud. I had been 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 185 

inspecting the hammocks of the good ship, when I saw with aston- 
ishment that several musical instraments, brazen and of great size, 
appeared to have suddenly developed two legs each, and to be trot- 
ting about a yard. And my astonishment was heightened when I 
observed a large drum, that had previously been leaning helpless 
against a wall, taking up a stout position on four legs. Approach- 
ing this drum and looking over it, I found two boys behind it (it 
was too much for one), and then I found that each of the brazen in- 
struments had brought out a boy, and was going to discourse sweet 
sounds. The boys — not omitting the fifer, now playing a new 
instrument — were dressed in neat uniform, and stood up in a 
circle at their music-stands, like any other ]\I^tary Band. They 
played a march or two, and then we had Cheer hojs, Cheer, and 
then we had Yankee Doodle, and we finished, as in loyal duty 
bound, with God Save the Queen. The band's proficiency was per- 
fectly wonderful, and it was not at all wonderful that the whole 
body corporate of Short-Timers listened with faces of the liveliest 
interest and pleasure. 

What happened next among the Short-Timers 1 As if the band 
had blown me into a great class-room out of their brazen tubes, in 
a great class-room I found myself now, with the whole choral force 
of Short-Timers singing the praises of a summer's day to the har- 
monium, and my small but highly-respected friend the fifer blazing 
away vocally, as if he had been saving up his wind for the last 
twelvemonth ; also the whole crew of the good ship Nameless 
swarming up and down the scale as if they had never swarmed up 
and down the rigging. This done, we threw our whole power into 
God bless the Prince of Wales, and blessed his Royal Highness to 
such an extent that, for my own Uncommercial part, I gasped 
again when it was over. The moment this was done, we formed, 
with surpassing freshness, into hollow squares, and fell to work at 
oral lessons, as if we never did, and had never thought of doing, 
anything else. 

Let a veil be drawn over the self-committals into which the Un- 
commercial Traveller would have been betrayed but for a discreet 
reticence, coupled with an air of absolute wisdom on the part of 
that artful personage. Take the square of five, multiply it by fif- 
teen, divide it by three, deduct eight from it, add four dozen to it, 
give me the result in pence, and tell me how many eggs I could 
get for it at three farthings apiece. The problem is hardly stated, 
when a dozen small boys pour out answers. Some wide, some very 
nearly right, some worked as far as they go with such accuracy, as at 
once to show what link of the chain has been dropped in the hurry. 
For the moment, none are quite right; but behold a labouring 



186 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

spirit beating the buttons on its corporeal waistcoat, in a process 
of internal calculation, and knitting an accidental bump on its cor- 
poreal forehead in a concentration of mental arithmetic ! It is my 
honourable friend (if he will allow me to call him so) the fifer. 
With right arm eagerly extended in token of being inspired with 
an answer, and with right leg foremost, the fifer solves the mystery : 
then recalls both arm and leg, and with bump in ambush awaits 
the next poser. Take the square of three, multiply it by seven, 
divide it by four, add fifty to it, take thirteen from it, multiply it 
by two, double it, give me the result in pence, and say how many 
half-pence. Wise as a serpent is the four feet of performer on the 
nearest approach to that instrument, whose right arm instantly ap- 
pears, and quenches this arithmetical fire. Tell me something about 
Great Britain, tell me something about its principal productions, tell 
me something about its ports, tell me something about its seas and 
rivers, tell me something about coal, iron, cotton, timber, tin, and tur- 
pentine. The hollow square bristles with extended right arms ; but 
ever faithful to fact is the fifer, ever wise as the serpent is the per- 
former on that instrument, ever prominently buoyant and brilliant 
are all members of the band. I observe the player of the cymbals 
to dash at a sounding answer now and then rather than not cut in 
at all ; but I take that to be in the way of his instrument. All 
these questions, and many such, are put on the spur of the moment, 
and by one who has never examined these boys. The Uncommer- 
cial, invited to add another, falteringly demands how many birth- 
days a man born on the twenty-ninth of February will have had on 
completing his fiftieth year ? A general perception of trap and 
pitfall instantly arises, and the fifer is seen to retire behind the 
corduroys of his next neighbours, as perceiving special necessity 
for collecting himself and communing with his mind. Meanwhile, 
the wisdom of the serpent suggests that the man will have had only 
one birthday in all that time, for how can any man have more than 
one, seeing that he is born once and dies once ? The blushing Un- 
commercial stands corrected, and amends the formula. Pondering 
ensues, two or three wrong answers are offered, and Cymbals strikes 
up " Six ! " but doesn't know why. Then modestly emerging from 
his Academic Grove of corduroys appears the fifer, right arm ex- 
tended, right leg foremost, bump irradiated. "Twelve, and two 
over ! " 

The feminine Short-Timers passed a similar examination, and 
very creditably too. Would have done better perhaps, with a little 
more geniality on the part of their pupil-teacher ; for a cold eye, 
my young friend, and a hard abrupt manner, are not by any means 
the powerful engines that your innocence supposes them to be. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 187 

Both girls and boys wrote excellently, from copy and dictation ; 
both could cook ; both could mend their own clothes ; both could 
clean up everything about them in an orderly and skilful way, the 
girls having womanly household knowledge superadded. Order and 
method began in the songs of the Infant School which I visited like- 
wise, and they were even in their dwarf degree to be found in the 
JNfursery, where the Uncommercial walking-stick was carried off with 
acclamations, and where "the Doctor" — a medical gentleman of 
two, who took his degree on the night when he was found at an 
apothecary's door — did the honours of the establishment with great 
urbanity and gaiety. 

These have long been excellent schools ; long before the days of 
the Short-Time. I first saw them, twelve or fifteen years ago. But 
since the introduction of the Short-Time system it has been proved 
here that eighteen hours a week of book-learning are more profit- 
able than thirty-six, and that the pupils are far quicker and brighter 
than of yore. The good influences of music on the whole body of 
children have likewise been surprisingly proved. Obviously an- 
other of the immense advantages of the Short-Time system to the 
cause of good education is the great diminution of its cost, and of 
the period of time over which it extends. The last is a most impor- 
tant consideration, as poor parents are always impatient to profit 
by their children's labour. 

It will be objected : Firstly, that this is all very well, but special 
local advantages and special selection of children must be necessary 
to such success. Secondly, that this is all very weU, but must be 
very expensive. Thirdly, that this is aU very well, but we have no 
proof of the results, sir, no proof 

On the first head of local advantages and special selection. 
Would Limehouse Hole be picked out for the site of a Children's 
Paradise ? Or would the legitimate and illegitimate pauper chil- 
dren of the long-shore population of such a riverside district, be 
regarded as unusually favourable specimens to work with ? Yet 
these schools are at Limehouse, and are the Pauper Schools of the 
Stepney Pauper Union. 

On the second head of expense. Would sixpence a week be con- 
sidered a very large cost for the education of each pupil, including 
all salaries of teachers and rations of teachers ? But supposing the 
cost were not sixpence a week, not fivepence ? It is fourpence- 

HALFPENNY. 

On the third head of no proof, sir, no proof. Is there any proof 
in the facts that Pupil Teachers more in number, and more highly 
qualified, have been produced here under the Short-Time system 
than under the Long-Time system 1 That the Short-Timers, in a 



188 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

writing competition, beat the Long-Timers of a first-class National 
School ? That the sailor-boys are in such demand for merchant 
ships, that whereas, before they were trained, lOl. premium used 
to be given with each boy — too often to some greedy brute of a 
drunken skipper, who disappeared before the term of apprentice- 
ship was out, if the ill-used boy didn't — captains of the best char- 
acter now take these boys more than willingly, with no premium at 
all ? That they are also much esteemed in the Royal Navy, which 
they prefer, " because everything is so neat and clean and orderly " ? 
Or, is there any proof in Naval captains writing, " Your little fellows 
are all that I can desire " 1 Or, is there any proof in such testimony 
as this : " The owner of a vessel called at the school, and said that 
as his ship was going down Channel on her last voyage, with one of 
the boys from the school on board, the pilot said, ' It would be as 
well if the royal were lowered ; I wish it were down.' Without 
waiting for any orders, and unobserved by the pilot, the lad, whom 
they had taken on board from the school, instantly mounted the 
mast and lowered the royal, and at the next glance of the pilot to 
the masthead, he perceived that the sail had been let down. He 
exclaimed, ' Who's done that job ? ' The owner, who was on board, 
said, 'That was the little fellow whom I put on board two days 
ago.' The pilot immediately said, 'Why, where could he have been 
brought up 1 ' That boy had never seen the sea or been on a real 
ship before ? " Or, is there any proof in these boys being in greater 
demand for Regimental Bands than the Union can meet 1 Or, in 
ninety-eight of them having gone into Regimental Bands in three 
years ? Or, in twelve of them being in the band of one regiment ? 
Or, in the colonel of that regiment writing, " We want six more 
boys ; they are excellent lads " 1 Or, in one of the boys having 
risen to be band-corporal in the same regiment 1 Or, in employers 
of all kinds chorusing, " Give us drilled boys, for they are prompt, 
obedient, and punctual " 1 Other proofs I have myself beheld with 
these Uncommercial eyes, though I do not regard myself as having 
a right to relate in what social positions they have seen respected 
men and women who were once pauper children of the Stepney 
Union. 

Into what admirable soldiers others of these boys have the capa- 
bilities for being turned, I need not point out. Many of them are 
always ambitious of military service ; and once upon a time when 
an old boy came back to see the old place, a cavalry soldier all com- 
plete, tvit/i his spurs on, such a yearning broke out to get into 
cavalry regiments and wear those sublime appendages, that it was 
one of the greatest excitements ever known in the school. The 
girls make excellent domestic servants, and at certain periods come 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 189 

back, a score or two at a time, to see the old building, and to take 
tea with the old teachers, and to hear the old band, and to see the 
old ship with her masts towering up above the neighbouring roofs 
and chimneys. As to the physical health of these schools, it is so 
exceptionally remarkable (simply because the sanitary regulations 
are as good as the other educational arrangements), that when Mr. 
TuFNELL, the Inspector, first stated it in a report, he was supposed, 
in spite of his high character, to have been betrayed into some 
extraordinary mistake or exaggeration. In the moral health of 
these schools, — where corporal punishment is unknown — Truth- 
fulness stands high. When the ship was first erected, the boys 
were forbidden to go aloft, until the nets, which are now always 
there, were stretched as a precaution against accidents. Certain 
boys, in their eagerness, disobeyed the injunction, got out of window 
in the early daylight, and climbed to the masthead. One boy un- 
fortunately fell, and was killed. There was no clue to the others ; 
but all the boys were assembled, and the chairman of the Board 
addressed them. " I promise nothing ; you see what a dreadful 
thing has happened ; you know what a grave offence it is that has 
led to such a consequence ; I cannot say what will be done with 
the offenders; but, boys, you have been trained here, above all 
things, to respect the truth. I want the truth. Who are the de- 
linquents ? " Instantly, the whole number of boys concerned, sep- 
arated from the rest, and stood out. 

Now, the head and heart of that gentleman (it is needless to say, 
a good head and a good heart) have been deeply interested in these 
schools for many years, and are so still ; and the establishment is 
very fortunate in a most admirable master, and moreover the schools 
of the Stepney Union cannot have got to be what they are, with- 
out the Stepney Board of Guardians having been earnest and 
humane men, strongly imbued with a sense of their responsibility. 
But what one set of men can do in this wise, another set of men can 
do ; and this is a noble example to all other Bodies and Unions, 
and a noble example to the State. Followed, and enlarged upon 
by its enforcement on bad parents, it would clear London streets 
of the most terrible objects they smite the sight with — myriads 
of little children who awfully reverse Our Saviour's words, and are 
not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Hell. 

Clear the public streets of such shame, and the public conscience 
of such reproach 1 Ah ! Almost prophetic, surely, the child's 
jingle : 

When will that be, 

Say the bells of Step-ney ! 



190 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

All the Year Round, Vol. 9, Ifo. 219, July 4, 1863. 
XXII. 

BOUND FOR THE GREAT SALT LAKE. 

Behold me on my way to an Emigrant Ship, on a hot morning 
early in June. My road lies through that part of London gener- 
ally known to the initiated as " Down by the Docks." Down by 
the Docks, is home to a good many people — to too many, if I 
may judge from the overflow of local population in the streets — 
but my nose insinuates that the number to whom it is Sweet 
Home might be easily counted. Down by the Docks, is a region 
I would choose as my point of embarkation aboard ship if I were an 
emigrant. It would present my intention to me in such a sensible 
light ; it would show me so many things to be run away from. 

Down by the Docks, they eat the largest oysters and scatter the 
roughest oyster shells, known to the descendants of Saint George ' 
and the Dragon. Down by the Docks, they consume the slimiest 
of shell-fish, which seem to have been scraped off the copper bot- 
toms of ships. Down by the Docks, the vegetables at green- 
grocers' doors acquire a saline and a scaly look, as if they had been 
crossed with fish and seaweed. Down by the Docks, they " board 
seamen" at the eating-houses, the public-houses, the slop-shops, 
the coffee-shops, the tally-shops, all kinds of shops mentionable 
and unmentionable — board them, as it were, in the piratical 
sense, making them bleed terribly, and giving no quarter. Down 
by the Docks, the seamen roam in mid-street and mid-day, their 
pockets inside-out, and their heads no better. Down by the Docks, 
the daughters of wave-ruling Britannia also rove, clad in silken attire, 
wdth uncovered tresses streaming in the breeze, bandanna kerchiefs 
floating from their shoulders, and crinoline not wanting. Down by 
the Docks, you may hear the Incomparable Joe Jackson sing the 
Standard of England, with a hornpipe, any night ; or any day 
may see at the w^axwork, for a penny and no waiting, him as killed 
the policeman at Acton and suffered for it. Down by the Docks, 
you may buy polonies, saveloys, and sausage preparations various, 
if you are not particular what they are made of besides seasoning. 
Down by the Docks, the children of Israel creep into any gloomy 
cribs and entries they can hire, and hang slops there — pewter 
watches, sou'-w^ester hats, waterproof overalls — " firtht rate arti- 
cleth, Thjack." Down by the Docks, such dealers exhibiting on a 
frame a complete nautical suit without the refinement of a waxen- 
visage in the hat, present the imaginary wearer as drooping at the 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 191 

yard-arm, with his seafaring and earthfaring troubles over. Down 
by the Docks, the placards in the shops apostrophise the cus- 
tomer, knowing him familiarly beforehand, as, "Look here, Jack ! " 
"Here's your sort, my lad !" "Try our sea-going mixed, at two 
and nine ! " " The right kit for the British tar ! " " Ship ahoy ! " 
"Splice the main-brace, brother!" "Come, cheer up, my lads. 
We've the best liquors here. And you'll find something new In our 
wonderful Beer ! " Down by the Docks, the pawnbroker lends 
money on Union-Jack pocket-handkerchiefs, on watches with little 
ships pitching fore and aft on the dial, on telescopes, nautical in- 
struments in cases, and such-like. Down by the Docks, the apoth- 
ecary sets up in business on the wretch edest scale — chiefly on lint 
and plaster for the strapping of wounds — and with no bright bot- 
tles, and with no little drawers. Down by the Docks, the shabby 
undertaker's shop will bury you for next to nothing, after the Malay 
or Chinaman has stabbed you for nothing at all : so you can hardly 
hope to make a cheaper end. Down by the Docks, anybody drunk 
will quarrel with anybody drunk or sober, and everybody else will 
have a hand in it, and on the shortest notice you may revolve in a 
whirlpool of red shirts, shaggy beards, wild heads of hair, bare 
tattooed arms, Britannia's daughters, malice, mud, maundering, 
and madness. Down by the Docks, scraping fiddles go in the 
public-houses all day long, and, shrill above their din and all the 
din, rises the screeching of innumerable parrots brought from for- 
eign parts, who appear to be very much astonished by what they 
find on these native shores of ours. Possibly the parrots don't 
know, possibly they do, that Down by the Docks is the road to 
the Pacific Ocean, with its lovely islands, where the savage girls 
plait flowers, and the savage boys carve cocoanut shells, and the 
grim blind idols muse in their shady groves to exactly the same 
purpose as the priests and chiefs. And possibly the parrots don't 
know, possibly they do, that the noble savage is a wearisome im- 
postor wherever he is, and has five hundred thousand volumes of 
indiff'erent rhyme, and no reason, to answer for. 

Shadwell church ! Pleasant whispers of there being a fresher 
air down the river than down by the Docks, go pursuing one an- 
other, playfully, in and out of the openings in its spire. Gigantic 
in the basin just beyond the church, looms my Emigrant Ship : her 
name, the Amazon. Her figure-head is not cZisfigured as those 
beauteous founders of the race of strong-minded women are fabled 
to have been, for the convenience of drawing the bow ; but I sym- 
pathise with the carver : 

A flattering carver who made it his care 

To carve busts as they ought to be — not as they were. 



192 THE UXCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

My Emigrant Ship lies broad side-on to the wharf. Two great 
gangways made of spars and planks connect her with the wharf; 
and up and down these gangways, perpetually crowding to and fro 
and in and out, like ants, are the Emigrants who are going to sail 
in my Emigrant Ship. Some with cabbages, some with loaves of 
bread, some with cheese and butter, some with milk and beer, some 
with boxes beds and bundles, some with babies — nearly all with 
children — nearly all with bran-new tin cans for their daily allow- 
ance of water, uncomfortably suggestive of a tin flavour in the 
drink. To and fro, up and down, aboard and ashore, swarming 
here and there and everywhere, my Emigrants. And still as the 
Dock-Gate swings upon its hinges, cabs appear, and carts appear, 
and vans appear, bringing more of my Emigrants, with more cab- 
bages, more loaves, more cheese and butter, more milk and beer, 
more boxes beds and bundles, more tin cans, and on those ship- 
ping investments accumulated compound interest of children. 

I go aboard my Emigrant Ship. I go first to the great cabin, 
and find it in the usual condition of a Cabin at that pass. Per- 
spiring landsmen, with loose papers, and with pens and inkstands, 
pervade it ; and the general appearance of things is as if the late 
Mr. Amazon's funeral had just come home from the cemeter}^, and 
the disconsolate Mrs. Amazon's trustees found the aff"airs in great 
disorder, and were looking high and low for the will. I go out on 
the poop-deck, for air, and surveying the emigrants on the deck be- 
low (indeed they are crowded all about me, up there too), find more 
pens and inkstands in action, and more papers, and interminable 
complication respecting accounts with individuals for tin cans and 
what not. But nobody is in an ill-temper, nobody is the worse for 
drink, nobody swears an oath or uses a coarse word, nobody appears 
depressed, nobody is weeping, and down upon the deck in every corner 
where it is possible to find a few square feet to kneel, crouch, or lie in, 
people, in every unsuitable attitude for writing, are writing letters. 

Now, I have seen emigrant ships before this day in June. And 
these people are so strikingly diff'erent from all other people in like 
circumstances whom I have ever seen, that I wonder aloud, " What 
would a stranger suppose these emigrants to be ! " 

The vigilant bright face of the weather-browned captain of the 
Amazon is at my shoulder, and he says, " What, indeed ! The 
most of these came aboard yesterday evening. They came from 
various parts of England in small parties that had never seen one 
another before. Yet they had not been a couple of hours on board, 
when they established their own police, made their own regulations, 
and set their own watches at all the hatchways. Before nine 
o'clock, the ship was as orderly and as quiet as a man-of-war." 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 193 

I looked about me again, and saw the letter-writing going on 
with the most curious composure. Perfectly abstracted in the 
midst of the crowd; while great casks were swinging aloft, and 
being lowered into the hold ; while hot agents were hurrying up 
and down, adjusting the interminable accounts; while two hun- 
dred strangers were searching everywhere for two hundred other 
strangers, and were asking questions about them of two hundred 
more ; while the children played up and down all the steps, and 
in and out among all the people's legs, and were beheld, to the gen- 
eral dismay, toppling over all the dangerous places ; the letter-writers 
wrote on calmly. On the starboard side of the ship, a grizzled 
man dictated a long letter to another grizzled man in an immense 
fur cap : which letter was of so profound a quality, that it became 
necessary for the amanuensis at intervals to take off his fur cap in 
both his hands, for the ventilation of his brain, and stare at him 
who dictated, as a man of many mysteries who was worth looking 
at. On the larboard side, a woman had covered a belaying-pin 
with a white cloth to make a neat desk of it, and was sitting on 
a little box, writing with the deliberation of a bookkeeper. Down 
upon her breast on the planks of the deck at this woman's feet, 
with her head diving in under a beam of the bulwarks on that side, 
as an eligible place of refuge for her sheet of paper, a neat and pretty 
girl wrote for a good hour (she fainted at last), only rising to the 
surface occasionally for a dip of ink. Alongside the boat, close to 
me on the poop-deck, another girl, a fresh well-grown country girl, 
was writing another letter on the bare deck. Later in the day, 
when this self-same boat was filled with a choir who sang glees 
and catches for a long time, one of the singers, a girl, sang her 
part mechanically all the while, and wrote a letter in the bottom 
of the boat while doing so. 

"A stranger would be puzzled to guess the right name for these 
people, Mr. Uncommercial," says the captain. 

" Indeed he would." 

" If you hadn't known, could you ever have supposed ? " 

" How could I ! I should have said they were in their degree, 
the pick and flower of England." 

" So should I," says the captain. 

" How many are they ? " 

" Eight hundred in round numbers." 

I went between-decks, where the families with children swarmed 
in the dark, where unavoidable confusion had been caused by the 
last arrivals, and where the confusion was increased by the little 
preparations for dinner that were going on in each group. A few 
women here and there, had got lost, and were laughing at it, and 
o 



194 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

asking their way to their own people, or out on deck again. A few 
of the poor children were crying ; but otherwise the universal cheer- 
fulness was amazing. "We shall shake down by to-morrow." 
" We shall come all right in a day or so." " We shall have more 
light at sea." Such phrases I heard everywhere, as I groped my 
way among chests and barrels and beams and unstowed cargo and 
ring-bolts and Emigrants, down to the lower-deck, and thence up 
to the light of day again, and to my former station. 

Surely, an extraordinary people in their power of self-abstraction ! 
All the former letter-writers were still writing calmly, and many 
more letter-writers had broken out in ray absence, A boy with a 
bag of books in his hand and a slate under his arm, emerged from 
below, concentrated himself in my neighbourhood (espying a con- 
venient skylight for his purpose), and went to work at a sum as 
if he were stone deaf A father and mother and several young 
children, on the main deck below me, had formed a family circle 
close to the foot of the crowded restless gangway, where the chil- 
dren made a nest for themselves in a coil of rope, and the father 
and mother, she suckling the youngest, discussed family affairs as 
peaceably as if they were in perfect retirement. I think the most 
noticeable characteristic in the eight hundred as a mass, was their 
exemption from hurry. 

Eight hundred what? "Geese, villain?" Eight hundred 
MoEMONS. I, Uncommercial Traveller for the firm of Human 
Interest Brothers, had come aboard this Emigrant Ship to see 
what Eight hundred Latter-Day Saints were like, and I found them 
(to the rout and overthrow of all my expectations) like wliat I now 
describe with scrupulous exactness. 

The Morman Agent who had been active in getting them to- 
gether, and in making the contract with my friends the owners of 
the ship to take them as far as New York on their way to the 
Great Salt Lake, w^as pointed out to me. A compactly-made hand- 
some man in black, rather short, with rich-brown hair and beard, 
and clear bright eyes. From his speech, I should set him down as 
American. Probably, a man who had " knocked about the world " 
pretty much. A man with a frank open manner, and unshrinking 
look ; withal a man of great quickness. I believe he was wholly 
ignorant of my Uncommercial individuality, and consequently of 
my immense Uncommercial importance. 

Uncommercial. These are a very fine set of people you have 
brought together here. 

Mormon Agent. Yes, sir, they are a very fine set of people. 

Uncommercial (looking about). Indeed, I think it would be 
difficult to find Eight hundred people together anywhere else, and 



THE UNCOMMEECIAL TRAVELLER. 195 

find so much beauty and so much strength and capacity for work 
among them. 

Mormon Agent (not looking about, but looking steadily at 
Uncommercial). I think so. — We sent out about a thousand 
more, yes'day, from Liverpool. 

Uncommercial. You are not going with these emigrants 1 

Mormon Agent. No, sir. I remain. 

Uncommercial. But you have been in the Mormon Territory? 

Mormon Agent. Yes ; I left Utah about three years ago. 

Uncommercial. It is surprising to me that these people are 
all so cheery, and make so little of the immense distance before 
them. 

Mormon Agent. Well, you see ; many of 'em have friends 
out at Utah, and many of 'em look forward to meeting friends on 
the way. 

Uncommercial. On the way ? 

Mormon Agent. This way 'tis. This ship lands 'em in New 
York City. Then they go on by rail right away beyond St. Louis, 
to that part of the Banks of the Missouri where they strike the 
Plains. There, waggons from the settlement meet 'em to bear 'em 
company on their journey 'cross — twelve hundred miles about. 
Industrious people who come out to the settlement soon get wag- 
gons of their own, and so the friends of some of these will come 
down in their own waggons to meet 'em. They look forward to 
that, greatly. 

Uncommercial. On their long journey across the Desert, do 
you arm them 1 

Mormon Agent. Mostly you would find they have arms of 
some kind or another already with them. Such as had not arms 
we should arm across the Plains, for the general protection and 
defence. 

Uncommercial. Will these waggons bring down any produce 
to the Missouri ? 

Mormon Agent. Well, since the war broke out, we've taken 
to growing cotton, and they'll likely bring down cotton to be ex- 
changed for machinery. We want machinery. Also we have 
taken to growing indigo, which is a fine commodity for profit. It 
has been found that the climate on the further side of the Great 
Salt Lake suits well for raising indigo. 

Uncommercial. I am told that these people now on board 
are principally from the South of England 1 

Mormon Agent. And from Wales. That's true. 

Uncommercial. Do you get many Scotch 1 

Mormon Agent. Not many. 



196 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TKAVELLER. 

Uncommercial. Highlanders, for instance ? 

Mormon Agent. No, not Highlanders. They ain't interested 
enough in universal brotherhood and peace and good will. 

Uncommercial. The old fighting blood is strong in them ? 

Mormon Agent. Well, yes. And besides ; they've no faith. 

Uncommercial (who has been burning to get at the Prophet 
Joe Smith, and seems to discover an opening). Faith in ! 

Mormon Agent (far too many for Uncommercial). Well. — 
In anything ! 

Similarly on this same head, the Uncommercial underwent dis- 
comfiture from a Wiltshire labourer : a simple fresh-coloured farm- 
labourer, of eight-and-thirty, who at one time stood beside him 
looking on at new arrivals, and with whom he held this dialogue : 

Uncommercial. Would you mind my asking you what part of 
the country you come from ? 

Wiltshire. Not a bit. Theer ! (exultingly) I've worked all 
my life o' Salisbury Plain, right under the shadder o' Stonehenge. 
You mightn't think it, but I halve. 

Uncommercial. And a pleasant country too. 

Wiltshire. Ah ! 'Tis a pleasant country. 

Uncommercial. Have you any family on board 1 

Wiltshire. Two children, boy and gal. I am a widderer, / 
am, and I'm going out alonger my boy and gal. That's my gal, 
and she's a fine gal o' sixteen (pointing out the girl who is writing 
by the boat). I'll go and fetch my boy. I'd like to show you my 
boy. (Here Wiltshire disappears, and presently comes back with 
a big shy boy of twelve, in a superabundance of boots, who is not 
at all glad to be presented.) He is a fine boy too, and a boy fur to 
work ! (Boy having undutifully bolted, Wiltshire drops him.) 

Uncommercial. It must cost you a great deal of money to go 
so far, three strong. 

Wiltshire. A power of money. Theer ! Eight shillen a week, 
eight shillen a week, eight shillen a week, put by out of the week's 
wages for ever so long. 

Uncommercial. I wonder how you did it. 

Wiltshire (recognising in this a kindred spirit). See theer 
now ! / wonder how I done it ! But what with a bit o' subscrip- 
tion heer, and what with a bit o' help theer, it were done, at last, 
though I don't hardly know how. Then it were unfort'net for us, 
you see, as we got kep' in Bristol so long — nigh a fortnight, it 
were — on accounts of a mistake wi' Brother Halliday. Swaller'd 
up money, it did, when we might have come straight on. 

Uncommercial (delicately approaching Joe Smith). You are 
of the Mormon religion, of course ? 



THE UNCOMJMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 197 

Wiltshire (confidently). yes, 7'm a Mormon. (Then reflec- 
tively.) I'm a Mormon. (Then, looking round the ship, feigns to 
descry a particular friend in an empty spot, and evades the Uncom- 
mercial for evermore.) 

After a noontide pause for dinner, during which my Emigrants 
were nearly all between-decks, and the Amazon looked deserted, a 
general muster took place. The muster was for the ceremony of 
passing the Government Inspector and the Doctor. Those author- 
ities held their temporary state amidships, by a cask or two ; and, 
knowing that the whole Eight hundred emigrants must come face 
to face with them, I took my station behind the two. They knew 
nothing whatever of me, I believe, and my testimony to the unpre- 
tending gentleness and good nature with which they discharged their 
duty, may be of the greater worth. There was not the slightest 
flavour of the Circumlocution Office about their proceedings. 

The emigrants were now all on deck. They were densely 
crowded aft, and swarmed upon the poop-deck like bees. Two or 
three Mormon agents stood ready to hand them on to the Inspector, 
and to hand them forward when they had passed. By what suc- 
cessful means, a special aptitude for organisation had been infused 
into these people, I am, of course, unable to report. But I know 
that, even now, there was no disorder, hurry, or difficulty. 

All being ready, the first group are handed on. That member 
of the party who is entrusted with the passenger-ticket for the whole, 
has been warned by one of the agents to have it ready, and here it 
is in his hand. In every instance through the whole eight hun- 
dred, without an exception, this paper is always ready. 

Inspector (reading the ticket). Jessie Jobson, Sophronia 
Jobson, Jessie Jobson again, Matilda Jobson, William Jobson, Jane 
Jobson, Matilda Jobson again, Brigham Jobson, Leonardo Jobson, 
and Orson Jobson. Are you all here ? (glancing at the party, over 
his spectacles). 

Jessie Jobson Number Two. All here, sir. 

This group is composed of an old grandfather and grandmother, 
their married son and his wife, and their family of children. Orson 
Jobson is a little child asleep in his mother's arms. The Doctor, 
with a kind word or so, lifts up the corner of the mother's shawl, 
looks at the child's face, and touches the little clenched hand. If 
we were all as well as Orson Jobson, doctoring would be a poor 
profession. 

Inspector. Quite right, Jessie Jobson. Take your ticket, 
Jessie, and pass on. 

And away they go. Mormon agent, skilful and quiet, hands 
them on. Mormon agent, skilful and quiet, hands next party up. 



198 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Inspector (reading ticket again). Susannah Cleverly and 
William Cleverly. Brother and sister, eh ? 

Sister (young woman of business, hustling slow brother). Yes, 
sir. 

Inspector. Very good, Susannah Cleverly. Take your ticket, 
Susannah, and take care of it. 

And away they go. 

Inspector (taking ticket again). Sampson Dibble and Dorothy 
Dibble (surveying a very old couple over his spectacles, with some 
surprise). Your husband quite blind, Mrs. Dibble ? 

Mrs. Dibble. Yes, sir, he be stone-blind. 

Mr. Dibble (addressing the mast). Yes, sir, I be stone-blind. 

Inspector. That's a bad job. Take your ticket, Mrs. Dibble, 
and don't lose it, and pass on. 

Doctor taps Mr. Dibble on the eyebrow with his forefinger, and 
away they go. 

Inspector (taking ticket again). Anastatia Weedle. 

Anastatia (a pretty girl, in a bright Garibaldi, this morning 
elected by universal suffrage the Beauty of the Ship). That is 
me, sir. 

Inspector. Going alone, Anastatia ? 

Anastatia (shaking her curls). I am with Mrs. Jobson, sir, 
but I've got separated for the moment. 

Inspector. Oh i You are with the Jobsons ? Quite right. 
That '11. do, Miss Weedle. Don't lose your ticket. 

Away she goes, and joins the Jobsons who are waiting for her, 
and stoops and kisses Brigham Jobson — who appears to be con- 
sidered too young for the purpose, by several Mormons rising 
twenty, who are looking on. Before her extensive skirts have 
departed from the casks, a decent mdow stands there with four 
children, and so the roll goes. 

The faces of some of the Welsh people, among whom there were 
many old persons, were certainly the least intelligent. Some of 
these emigrants would have bungled sorely, but for the directing 
hand that was always ready. The intelligence here was unques- 
tionably of a low order, and the heads were of a poor type. Gen- 
erally the case was the reverse. There were many worn faces 
bearing traces of patient poverty and hard work, and there was 
great steadiness of purpose and much undemonstrative self-respect 
among this class. A few young men were going singly. Several 
girls were going, two or three together. These latter I found it 
very difficult to refer back, in my mind, to their relinquished homes 
and pursuits. Perhaps they were more like country milliners, and 
pupil teachers rather tawdrily dressed, than any other classes of 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 199 

young women. I noticed, among many little ornaments worn, 
more than one photograph-brooch of the Princess of Wales, and 
also of the late Prince Consort. Some single women of from thirty 
to forty, whom one might suppose to be embroiderers, or straw- 
bonnet-makers, were obviously going out in quest of husbands, as 
finer ladies go to India. That they had any distinct notions of 
a plurality of husbands or wives, I do not believe. To suppose the 
family groups of whom the majority of emigrants were composed, 
polygamically possessed, would be to suppose an absurdity, manifest 
to any one who saw the fathers and mothers. 

I should say (I had no means of ascertaining the fact) that most 
familiar kinds of handicraft trades were represented here. Farm- 
labourers, shepherds, and the like, had their full share of representa- 
tion, but I doubt if they preponderated. It was interesting to see 
how the leading spirit in the family circle never failed to show 
itself, even in the simple process of answering to the names as they 
were called, and checking off the owners of the names. Sometimes 
it was the father, much oftener the mother, sometimes a quick little 
girl second or third in order of seniority. It seemed to occur for 
the first time to some heavy fathers, what large families they had ; 
and their eyes rolled about, during the calling of the list, as if they 
half-misdoubted some other family to have been smuggled into their 
own. Among all the fine handsome children, I observed but two 
with marks upon their necks that were probably scrofulous. Out 
of the whole number of emigrants, but one old woman was tempo- 
rarily set aside by the doctor, on suspicion of fever ; but even she 
afterwards obtained a clean bill of health. 

When all had "passed," and the afternoon began to wear on, a 
black box became visible on deck, which box was in charge of cer- 
tain personages also in black, of whom only one had the conven- 
tional air of an itinerant preacher. This box contained a supply of 
hymn-books, neatly printed and got up, published at Liverpool, and 
also in London at the " Latter-Day Saints' Book Depot, 30, Flor- 
ence-street." Some copies were handsomely bound ; the plainer 
were the more in request, and many were bought. The title ran : 
" Sacred Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Church of Jesus 
Christ of Latter-Day Saints." The Preface, dated Manchester, 
1840, ran thus: — "The Saints in this country have been very 
desirous for a Hymn Book adapted to their faith and worship, that 
they might sing the truth with an understanding heart, and express 
their praise joy and gratitude in songs adapted to the New and 
Everlasting Covenant. In accordance with their wishes, we have 
selected the following volume, which we hope will prove accept- 
able until a greater variety can be added. With sentiments of 



200 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

high cousideration and esteem, we subscribe ourselves your breth- 
ren in the New and Everlasting Covenant, Brigham Young, 
Parley P. Pratt, John Taylor." From this book — by no 
means explanatory to myself of the New and Everlasting Covenant, 
and not at all making my heart an understanding one on the sub- 
ject of that mystery — a hymn was sung, which did not attract any 
great amount of attention, and was supported by a rather select 
circle. But the choir in the boat was very popular and pleasant ; 
and there was to have been a Band, only the Cornet was late in 
coming on board. In the course of the afternoon, a mother ap- 
peared from shore, in search of her daughter, " who had run away 
with the Mormons." She received every assistance from the 
Inspector, but her daughter was not found to be on board. The 
saints did not seem to me, particularly interested in finding her. 

Towards five o'clock, the galley became full of tea-kettles, and 
an agreeable fragrance of tea pervaded the ship. There was no 
scrambling or jostling for the hot water, no ill humour, no quarrel- 
ling. As the Amazon was to sail with the next tide, and as it 
would not be high water before two o'clock in the morning, I left 
her with her tea in full action, and her idle Steam Tug lying by, 
deputing steam and smoke for the time being to the Tea-kettles. 

I afterwards learned that a Despatch was sent home by the 
captain before he struck out into the wide Atlantic, highly extol- 
ling the behaviour of these Emigrants, and the perfect order and 
propriety of all their social arrangements. What is in store for the 
poor people on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, what happy 
delusions they are labouring under now, on what miserable blind- 
ness their eyes may be opened then, I do not pretend to say. But 
I went on board their ship to bear testimony against them if they 
deserved it, as I fully believed they would ; to my great astonish- 
ment they did not deserve it ; and my predispositions and ten- 
dencies must not affect me as an honest witness. I went over the 
Amazon's side, feeling it impossible to deny that, so far, some 
remarkable influence had produced a remarkable result, which 
better known influences have often missed.^ 

1 After this Uncommercial Journey was printed, I happened to 
mention the experience it describes to Lord Houghton. That gentle- 
man then showed me an article of his writing, in The Edinburgh 
Beview for January, 1862, which is highly remarkable for its philo- 
sophical and literary research concerning these Latter-Day Saints. I 
find in it the following sentences: — "The Select Committee of the 
House of Commons on emigrant ships for 1854 summoned the Mormon 
agent and passenger-broker before it, and came to the conclusion that 
no ships under the provisions of the 'Passengers Act' could be de- 
pended upon for comfort and security in the same degree as those 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 201 

All the Year Bound, Vol 9, No. 221, July 18, 1863. 
XXIII. 

THE CITY OF THE ABSENT. 

When I think I deserve particularly well of myself, and have 
earned the right to enjoy a little treat, I stroll from Covent-garden 
into the City of London, after business-hours there, on a Saturday, 
or — better yet — on a Sunday, and roam about its deserted nooks 
and corners. It is necessary to the full enjoyment of these journeys 
that they should be made in summer-time, for then the retired 
spots that I love to haunt, are at their idlest and dullest. A gentle 
fall of rain is not objectionable, and a warm mist sets off my favour- 
ite retreats to decided advantage. 

Among these. City Churchyards hold a high place. Such 
strange churchyards hide in the City of London ; churchyards 
sometimes so entirely detached from churches, always so pressed 
upon by houses ; so small, so rank, so silent, so forgotten, except 
by the few people who ever look down into them from their smoky 
windows. As I stand peeping in through the iron gates and rails, 
I can peel the rusty metal off, like bark from an old tree. The 
illegible tombstones are all lop-sided, the grave-mounds lost their 
shape in the rains of a hundred years ago, the Lombardy Poplar 
or Plane-Tree that was once a drysalter's daughter and several 
common-councilmen, has withered like those worthies, and its de- 
parted leaves are dust beneath it. Contagion of slow ruin over- 
hangs the place. The discoloured tiled roofs of the environing 
buildings stand so awry, that they can hardly be proof against any 
stress of weather. Old crazy stacks of chimneys seem to look 
down as they overhang, dubiously calculating how far they will 
have to fall. In an angle of the walls, what was once the tool- 
house of the grave-digger rots away, encrusted with toadstools. 
Pipes and spouts for carrying off the rain from the encompassing 
gables, broken or feloniously cut for old lead long ago, now let the 
rain drip and splash as it list, upon the weedy earth. Sometimes 
there is a rusty pump somewhere near, and, as I look in at the 
rails and meditate, I hear it working under an unknown hand with 
a creaking protest : as though the departed in the churchyard 
urged, " Let us lie here in peace ; don't suck us up and drink us ! " 

One of my best beloved churchyards, I call the churchyard of 

under his administration. The Mormon ship is a Family under strong 
and accepted discipline, with every provision for comfort, decorum, 
and internal peace." 



202 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Saint Ghastly Grim ; touching what men in general call it, I have 
no information. It lies at the heart of the City, and the Blackwall 
Eailway shrieks at it daily. It is a small small churchyard, with 
a ferocious strong spiked iron gate, like a jail. This gate is orna- 
mented with skulls and cross-bones, larger than the life, wrought 
in stone; but it likewise came into the mind of Saint Ghastly 
Grim, that to stick iron spikes a-top of the stone skulls, as though 
they were impaled, would be a pleasant device. Therefore the 
skulls grin aloft horribly, thrust through and through with iron 
spears. Hence, there is attraction of repulsion for me in Saint 
Ghastly Grim, and, having often contemplated it in the daylight 
and the dark, I once felt drawn towards it in a thunderstorm at 
midnight. " Why not ? " I said, in self-excuse. " I have been to 
see the Colosseum by the light of .the moon ; is it worse to go to 
see Saint Ghastly Grim by the light of the lightning ? " I repaired 
to the Saint in a hackney cab, and found the skulls most effective, 
having the air of a public execution, and seeming, as the lightning 
flashed, to wink and grin with the pain of the spikes. Having no 
other person to whom to impart my satisfaction, I communicated 
it to the driver. So far from being responsive, he surveyed me — 
he was naturally a bottled-nosed red-faced man — with a blanched 
countenance. And as he drove me back, he ever and again glanced 
in over his shoulder through the little front window of his carriage, 
as mistrusting that I was a fare originally from a grave in the 
churchyard of Saint Ghastly Grim, who might have flitted home 
again without paying. 

Sometimes, the queer Hall of some queer Company gives upon a 
churchyard such as this, and, when the Livery dine, you may hear 
them (if you are looking in through the iron rails, which you never 
are when I am) toasting their own Worshipful prosperity. Some- 
times, a wholesale house of business, requiring much room for 
stowage, will occupy one or two or even all three sides of the en- 
closing space, and the backs of bales of goods will lumber up the 
windows, as if they were holding some crowded trade-meeting of 
themselves within. Sometimes, the commanding windows are all 
blank, and show no more sign of life than the graves below — not 
so much, for they tell of what once upon a time was life undoubt- 
edly. Such was the surrounding of one City churchyard that I 
saw last summer, on a Volunteering Saturday evening towards eight 
of the clock, when with astonishment I beheld an old old man and 
an old old woman in it, making hay. Yes, of all occupations in this 
world, making hay ! It was a very confined patch of churchyard 
lying between Gracechurch-street and the Tower, capable of yield- 
ing, say an apronful of hay. By what means the old old man and 




TIME AND HIS WIFE. 



204 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

woman had got into it, with an almost toothless hay-making rake, 
I could not fathom. No open window w^as within view ; no win- 
dow at all was within view, sufficiently near the ground to have 
enabled their old legs to descend from it ; the rusty churchyard- 
gate was locked, the mouldy church was locked. Gravely among 
the graves, they made hay, all alone by themselves. They looked 
like Time and his wife. There was but the one rake between 
them, and they both had hold of it in a pastorally-loving manner, 
and there was hay on the old woman's black bonnet, as if the old 
man had recently been playful. The old man was quite an obso- 
lete old man, in knee-breeches and coarse grey stockings, and the 
old woman wore mittens like unto his stockings in texture and in 
colour. They took no heed of me as I looked on, unable to account 
for them. The old woman was much too bright for a pew-opener, 
the old man much too meek for a beadle. On an old tombstone 
in the foreground between me and them, were two cherubim ; but 
for those celestial embellishments being represented as having no 
possible use for knee-breeches, stockings, or mittens, I should have 
compared them with the hay-makers, and sought a likeness. I 
coughed and awoke the echoes, but the hay-makers never looked at 
me. They used the rake with a measured action, drawing the 
scanty crop towards them ; and so I was fain to leave them under 
three yards and a half of darkening sky, gravely making hay 
among the graves, all alone by themselves. Perhaps they were 
Spectres, and I wanted a Medium. 

In another City churchyard of similar cramped dimensions, I 
saw, that self-same summer, two comfortable charity children. 
They were making love — tremendous proof of the vigour of that 
immortal article, for they were in the graceful uniform under 
which English Charity delights to hide herself — and they were 
overgrown, and their legs (his legs at least, for I am modestly in- 
competent to speak of hers) were as much in the wrong as mere 
passive weakness of character can render legs. it was a leaden 
churchyard, but no doubt a golden ground to those young persons ! 
I first saw them on a Saturday evening, and, perceiving from their 
occupation that Saturday evening was their trysting-time, I re- 
turned that evening se'nnight, and renewed the contemplation of 
them. They came there to shake the bits of matting which were 
spread in the church aisles, and they afterwards rolled them up, he 
rolling his end, she rolling hers, until they met, and over the two 
once divided now united rolls — sweet emblem ! — gave and re- 
ceived a chaste salute. It was so refreshing to find one of my 
faded churchyards blooming into flower thus, that I returned a 
second time, and a third, and ultimately this befell : — They had 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 205 

left the church door open, in their dusting and arranging. Walking 
in to look at the church, I became aware, by the dim light, of him 
in the pulpit, of her in the reading-desk, of him looking down, of 
her looking up, exchanging tender discourse. Immediately both 
dived, and became as it were non-existent on this sphere. With 
an assumption of innocence I turned to leave the sacred edifice, 
when an obese form stood in the portal, puMy demanding Joseph, 
or in default of Joseph, Celia. Taking this monster by the sleeve, 
and luring him forth on pretence of showing him whom he sought, 
I gave time for the emergence of Joseph and Celia, who presently 
came towards us in the churchyard, bending under dusty matting, 
a picture of thriving and unconscious industry. It would be super- 
fluous to hint that I have ever since deemed this the proudest pas- 
sage in my life. 

But such instances, or any tokens of vitality, are rare indeed in 
my City churchyards. A few sparrows occasionally try to raise a 
lively chirrup in their solitary tree — perhaps, as taking a different 
view of worms from that entertained by humanity — but they are 
flat and hoarse of voice, like the clerk, the organ, the beU, the 
clergyman, and aU the rest of the Church-works when they are 
wound up for Sunday. Caged larks, thrushes, or blackbirds, hang- 
ing in neighbouring courts, pour forth their strains passionately, as 
scenting the tree, trying to break out, and see leaves again before 
they die, but their song is Willow, WiUow — of a churchyard cast. 
So little light lives inside the churches of my churchyards, when 
the two are co-existent, that it is often only by an accident and 
after long acquaintance that I discover their having stained glass 
in some odd window. The westering sun slants into the church- 
yard by some unwonted entry, a few prismatic tears drop on an 
old tombstone, and a window that I thought was only dirty, is for 
the moment all bejewelled. Then the light passes and the colours 
die. Though even then, if there be room enough for me to faU 
back so far as that I can gaze up to the top of the Church Tower, 
I see the rusty vane new burnished, and seeming to look out with 
a joyful flash over the sea of smoke at the distant shore of country. 

Blinking old men who are let out of workhouses by the hour, 
have a tendency to sit on bits of coping stone in these church- 
yards, leaning with both hands on their sticks and asthmatically 
gasping. The more depressed class of beggars too, bring hither 
broken meats, and munch. I am on nodding terms with a medita- 
tive turncock who lingers in one of them, and whom I suspect of a 
turn for poetry ; the rather, as he looks out of temper when he 
gives the fire-plug a disparaging wrench with that large tuning-fork 
of his which would wear out the shoulder of his coat, but for a 



206 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

precautionary piece of inlaid leather. Fire-ladders, which I am 
satisfied nobody knows anything about, and the keys of which were 
lost in ancient times, moulder away in the larger churchyards, un- 
der eaves like wooden eyebrows ; and so removed are those corners 
from the haunts of men and boys, that once on a fifth of November 
I found a " Guy " trusted to take care of himself there, while his 
proprietors had gone to dinner. Of the expression of his face I 
cannot report, because it was turned to the wall ; but his shrugged 
shoulders and his ten extended fingers, appeared to denote that he 
had moralised in his little straw chair on the mystery of mortality 
until he gave it up as a bad job. 

You do not come upon these churchyards violently ; there are 
shades of transition in the neighbourhood. An antiquated news 
shop, or barber's shop, apparently bereft of customers in the earlier 
days of George the Third, would warn me to look out for one, if any 
discoveries in this respect were left for me to make. A very quiet 
court, in combination with an unaccountable dyer's and scourer's, 
would prepare me for a churchyard. An exceedingly retiring public- 
house, with a bagatelle-board shadily visible in a sawdusty parlour 
shaped like an omnibus, and with a shelf of punch-bowls in the bar, 
would apprise me that I stood near consecrated ground. A " Dairy," 
exhibiting in its modest window one very little milk-can and three 
eggs, would suggest to me the certainty of finding the poultry hal-d 
by, pecking at my forefathers. I first inferred the vicinity of 
Saint Ghastly Grim, from a certain air of extra repose and gloom 
pervading a vast stack of warehouses. 

From the hush of these places, it is congenial to pass into the 
hushed resorts of business. Down the lanes I like to see the carts 
and waggons huddled together in repose, the cranes idle, and the 
warehouses shut. Pausing in the alleys behind the closed Banks 
of mighty Lombard-street, it gives one as good as a rich feeling to 
think of the broad counters with a rim along the edge, made for 
telling money out on, the scales for weighing precious metals, the 
ponderous ledgers, and, above all, the bright copper shovels for 
shovelling gold. When I draw money, it never seems so much 
money as when it is shovelled at me out of a bright copper shovel. 
I like to say, "In gold," and to see seven pounds musically pour- 
ing out of the shovel, like seventy ; the Bank appearing to remark 
to me — I italicise appearing — "if you want more of this yellow 
earth, we keep it in barrows at your service." To think of the 
banker's clerk with his deft finger turning the crisp edges of the 
Hundred-Pound Notes he has taken in a fat roll out of a drawer, 
is again to hear the rustling of that delicious south-cash wind. 
*' How will you have it ? " I once heard this usual question asked 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 207 

at a Bank Counter of an elderly female, habited in mourning and 
steeped in simplicity, who answered, open-eyed, crook-fingered, 
laughing with expectation, "Anyhow!" Calling these things to 
mind as I stroll among the Banks, I wonder whether the other 
solitary Sunday man I pass, has designs upon the Banks. For the 
interest and mystery of the matter, I almost hope he may have, and 
that his confederate may be at this moment taking impressions of 
the keys of the iron closets in wax, and that a delightful robbery 
may be in course of transaction. About College-hill, Mark -lane, 
and so on towards the Tower, and Dockward, the deserted wine- 
merchants' cellars are fine subjects for consideration ; but the de- 
serted money-cellars of the Bankers, and their plate cellars, and 
their jewel-cellars, what subterranean regions of the Wonderful 
Lamp are these ! And again : possibly some shoeless boy in rags, 
passed through this street yesterday, for whom it is reserved to be 
a Banker in the fulness of time, and to be surpassing rich. Such 
reverses have been, since the days of Whittington ; and were, long 
before. I want to know whether the boy has any foreglittering of 
that glittering fortune now, when he treads these stones, hungry. 
Much as I also want to know whether the next man to be hanged 
at Newgate yonder, had any suspicion upon him that he was moving 
steadily towards that fate, when he talked so much about the last 
man who paid the same great debt at the same small Debtors' Door. 
AVhere are all the people who on busy working-days pervade 
these scenes ? The locomotive banker's clerk, who carries a black 
portfolio chained to him by a chain of steel, where is he ? Does 
he go to bed with his chain on — to church with his chain on — 
or does he lay it by 1 And if he lays it by, what becomes of his 
portfolio when he is unchained for a holiday? The wastepaper 
baskets of these closed counting-houses would let me into many 
hints of business matters if I had the exploration of them ; and 
what secrets of the heart should I discover on the " pads " of the 
young clerks — the sheets of cartridge-paper and blotting-paper 
interposed between their writing and their desks ! Pads are taken 
into confidence on the tenderest occasions, and oftentimes when I 
have made a business visit, and have sent in my name from the 
outer office, have I had it forced on my discursive notice that the 
officiating young gentleman has over and over again inscribed 
Amelia, in ink of various dates, on corners of his pad. Indeed, 
the pad may be regarded as the legitimate modern successor of the 
old forest-tree : whereon these young knights (having no attainable 
forest nearer than Epping) engrave the names of their mistresses. 
After all, it is a more satisfactory process than carving, and can be 
oftener repeated. So these courts in their Sunday rest are courts 



208 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

of Love Omnipotent (I rejoice to bethink myself), dry as they look. 
And here is Garraway's, bolted and shuttered hard and fast ! It is 
possible to imagine the man who cuts the sandwiches, on his back 
in a hayfield ; it is possible to imagine his desk, like the desk of a 
clerk at church, without him ; but imagination is unable to pursue 
the men who wait at Garraway's all the week for the men who 
never come. When they are forcibly put out of Garraway's on 
Saturday night — which they must be, for they never would go out 
of their own accord — where do they vanish until Monday morning ? 
On the first Sunday that I ever strayed here, I expected to find 
them hovering about these lanes, like restless ghosts, and trying 
to peep into Garraway's through chinks in the shutters, if not 
endeavouring to turn the lock of the door with false keys, picks, 
and screw-drivers. But the wonder is, that they go clean away ! 
And now I think of it, the wonder is, that every working-day per- 
vader of these scenes goes clean away. The man Avho sells the 
dogs' collars and the little toy coal-scuttles, feels under as great an 
obligation to go afar off, as Glyn and Co., or Smith, Payne, and 
Smith. There is an old monastery-crypt under Garraway's (I have 
been in it among the port wine), and perhaps Garraway's, taking 
pity on the mouldy men who wait in its public-room all their lives, 
gives them cool house-room down there over Sundays ; but the 
catacombs of Paris would not be large enough to hold the rest of 
the missing. This characteristic of London City greatly helps its 
being the quaint place it is in the weekly pause of business, and 
greatly helps my Sunday sensation in it of being the Last Man. 
In my solitude, the ticket-porters being all gone with the rest, I 
venture to breathe to the quiet bricks and stones my confidential 
wonderment why a ticket-porter, who never does any work with 
his hands, is bound to wear a white apron, and why a great Eccle- 
siastical Dignitary, who never does any work with his hands either, 
is equally bound to wear a black one. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 9, JVb. 223, Aug. 1, 1863. 
XXIV. 

AN OLD STAGE-COACHING HOUSE. 

Before the waitress had shut the door, I had forgotten how 
many stage-coaches she said used to change horses in the town 
every day. But it was of little moment ; any high number would 
do as well as another. It had been a great stage-coaching town 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 209 

in the great stage-coaching times, and the ruthless railways had 
killed and buried it. 

The sign of the house was the Dolphin's Head. Why only 
head, I don't know; for the Dolphin's effigy at full length, and 
upside down — ^as a Dolphin is always bound to be when artis- 
tically treated, though I suppose he is sometimes right side upward 
in his natural condition — graced the sign-board. The sign-board 
chafed its rusty hooks outside the bow-window of my room, and 
was a shabby work. No visitor could have denied that the 
Dolphin was dying by inches, but he showed no bright colours. 
He had once served another master ; there was a newer streak of 
paint below him, displaying with inconsistent freshness the legend, 
By J. Mellows. 

My door opened again, and J, Mellows's representative came 
back. I had asked her what I could have for dinner, and she 
now returned with the counter question, what would I like ? As . 
the Dolphin stood possessed of nothing that I do like, I was fain to 
yield to the suggestion of a duck, which I don't like. J. Mellows's 
representative was a mournful young woman, with one eye suscep- 
tible of guidance, and one uncontrollable eye ; which latter, seem- 
ing to wander in quest of stage-coaches, deepened the melancholy 
in which the Dolphin was steeped. 

This young woman had but shut the door on retiring again 
when I bethought me of adding to my order, the words, "with 
nice vegetables." Looking out at the door to give them emphatic 
utterance, I found her already in a state of pensive catalepsy in 
the deserted gallery, picking her teeth with a pin. 

At the Railway Station seven miles off, I had been the subject 
of wonder when I ordered a fly in which to come here. And when 
I gave the direction " To the Dolphin's Head," I had observed an 
ominous stare on the countenance of the strong young man in 
velveteen, who was the platform servant of the Company. He 
had also called to my driver at parting, " All ri-ight ! Don't hang 
yourself when you get there, Geo-o-rge ! " in a sarcastic tone, for 
which I had entertained some transitory thoughts of reporting him 
to the General Manager. 

I had no business in the town — I never have any business in 
any town — but I had been caught by the fancy that I would 
come and look at it in its degeneracy. My purpose was fitly inau- 
gurated by the Dolphin's Head, which everywhere expressed past 
coachfulness and present coachlessness. Coloured prints of coaches, 
starting, arriving, changing horses, coaches in the sunshine, coaches 
in the snow, coaches in the wind, coaches in the mist and rain, 
coaches on the King's birthday, coaches in all circumstances com- 



210 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

patible with their triumph and victory, but never in the act of 
breaking down or overturning, pervaded the house. Of these works 
of art, some, framed and not glazed, had holes in them ; the varnish 
of others had become so brown and cracked, that they looked like 
overdone pie-crust ; the designs of others were almost obliterated 
by the flies of many summers. Broken glasses, damaged frames, 
lop-sided hanging, and consignment of incurable cripples to places 
of refuge in dark corners, attested the desolation of the rest. The 
old room on the ground floor where the passengers of the Highflyer 
used to dine, had nothing in it but a wretched show of twigs and 
flower-pots in the broad window to hide the nakedness of the land, 
and in a corner little Mellows's perambulator, with even its parasol- 
head turned despondently to the wall. The other room, where 
post-horse company used to wait while relays were getting ready 
down the yard, still held its ground, but was as airless as I conceive 
a hearse to be : insomuch that Mr. Pitt, hanging high against the 
partition (with spots on him like port wine, though it is mysterious 
how port wine ever got squirted up there), had good reason for 
perking his nose and snifling. The stopperless cruets on the 
spindle-shanked sideboard were in a miserably dejected state : the 
anchovy sauce having turned blue some years ago, and the cayenne 
pepper (with a scoop in it like a small model of a wooden leg) 
having turned solid. The old fraudulent candles which were 
always being paid for and never used, were burnt out at last ; but 
their tall stilts of candlesticks still lingered, and still outraged the 
human intellect by pretending to be silver. The mouldy old un- 
reformed Borough Member, with his right hand buttoned up in 
the breast of his coat, and his back characteristically turned on 
bales of petitions from his constituents, was there too ; and the 
poker which never had been among the fire-irons, lest post-horse 
company should overstir the fire, was not there, as of old. 

Pursuing my researches in the Dolphin's Head, I found it sorely 
shrunken. When J. Mellows came into possession, he had walled 
off half the bar, which was now a tobacco-shop v/ith its own entrance 
in the yard — the once glorious . yard where the post-boys, whip in 
hand and always buttoning their waistcoats at the last moment, 
used to come running forth to mount and away. A "Scientific 
Shoeing-Smith and Veterinary Surgeon," had further encroached 
upon the yard ; and a grimly satirical Jobber, who announced him- 
self as having to Let "A neat one-horse fly, and a one-horse cart," 
had established his business, himself, and his family, in a part of 
the extensive stables. Another part was lopped clean off from 
the Dolphin's Head, and now comprised a chapel, a wheelwright's, 
and a Young Men's Mutual Improvement and Discussion Society 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 211 

(in a loft) : the whole forming a back lane. No audacious hand 
had plucked down the vane from the central cupola of the stables, 
but it had grown rusty and stuck at N — Nil : while the score or 
two of pigeons that remained true to their ancestral traditions and 
the place, had collected in a row on the roof-ridge of the only out- 
house retained by the Dolphin, where all the inside pigeons tried 
to push the outside pigeon off. This I accepted as emblematical of 
the struggle for post and place in railway times. 

Sauntering forth into the town, by way of the covered and 
pillared entrance to the Dolphin's Yard, once redolent of soup and 
stable-litter, now redolent of musty disuse, I paced the street. It 
was a hot day, and the little sun-blinds of the shops were all 
drawn down, and the more enterprising tradesmen had caused their 
'Prentices to trickle water on the pavement appertaining to their 
frontage. It looked as if they had been shedding tears for the 
stage-coaches, and drying their ineffectual pocket-handkerchiefs. 
Such weakness would have been excusable ; for business was — as 
one dejected porkman who kept a shop which refused to reciprocate 
the compliment by keeping him, informed me — "bitter bad." 
Most of the harness-makers and corn-dealers were gone the way of 
the coaches, but it was a pleasant recognition of the eternal pro- 
cession of Children down that old original steep Incline, the Valley 
of the Shadow, that those tradesmen were mostly succeeded by 
vendors of sweetmeats and cheap toys. The opposition house to 
the Dolphin, once famous as the New White Hart, had long col- 
lapsed. In a fit of abject depression, it had cast whitewash on its 
windows, and boarded up its front door, and reduced itself to a side 
entrance ; but even that had proved a world too wide for the Liter- 
ary Institution which had been its last phase ; for the Institution 
had collapsed too, and of the ambitious letters of its inscription on 
the White Hart's front, all had fallen off but these : 

L Y INS T 

— suggestive of Lamentably Insolvent. As to the neighbouring 
market-place, it seemed to have wholly relinquished marketing, to 
the dealer in crockery whose pots and pans straggled half across it, 
and to the Cheap Jack who sat with folded arms on the shafts of 
his cart, superciliously gazing around ; his velveteen waistcoat, evi- 
dently harbouring grave doubts whether it was worth his while to 
stay a night in such a place. 

The church bells began to ring as I left this spot, but they by 
no means improved the case, for they said, in a petulant way, and 
speaking with some difficulty in their irritation, " WHAT's-be-come- 
of-THE-coach-ES 1 " Nor would they (I found on listening) ever vary 



212 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

their emphasis, save in respect of growing more sharp and vexed, 
but invariably went on, " WHAT's-be-come-of-THE-coach-ES ! " — 
always beginning the inquiry with an unpolite abruptness. Perhaps 
from their elevation they saw the railway, and it aggravated them. 

Coming upon a coachmaker's workshop, I began to look about 
me with a revived spirit, thinking that perchance I might behold 
there some remains of the old times of the town's greatness. There 
was only one man at work — a dry man, grizzled, and far advanced 
in years, but tall and upright, who, becoming aware of me looking 
on, straightened his back, pushed up his spectacles against his' 
brown paper cap, and appeared inclined to defy me. To whom I 
pacifically said : 

" Good day, sir ! " 

"What?" said he. 

" Good day, sir." 

He seemed to consider about that, and not to agree with me. — 
"Was you a looking for anything?" he then asked, in a pointed 
manner. 

" I was wondering w^hether there happened to be any fragment 
of an old stage-coach here." 

"Is that all?" 

" That's all." 

" No, there ain't." 

It was now my turn to say "Oh ! " and I said it. Not another 
word did the dry and grizzled man say, but bent to his work again. 
In the coach-making days, the coach-painters had tried their brushes 
on a post beside him ; and quite a Calendar of departed glories was 
to be read upon it, in blue and yellow and red and green, some inches 
thick. Presently he looked up again. 

" You seem to have a deal of time on your hands," was his queru- 
lous remark. 

I admitted the fact. 

"I think it's a pity you was not brought up to something," said 
he. 

I said I thought so too. 

Appearing to be informed with an idea, he laid down his plane 
(for it was a plane he was at work with), pushed up his spectacles 
again, and came to the door. 

"Would a po-shay do for you ? " he asked. 

"I am not sure that I understand what you mean." 

"Would a po-shay," said the coachmaker, standing close before 
me, and folding his arms in the manner of a cross-examining coun- 
sel — " would a po-shay meet the views you have expressed ? Yes, 
or no ? " 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 213 

"Yes." 

"Then you keep straight along down there till you see one. 
You'll see one if you go fur enough." 

With that, he turned me by the shoulder in the direction I was 
to take, and went in and resumed his work against a background 
of leaves and grapes. For, although he was a soured man and a 
discontented, his workshop was that agreeable mixture of town and 
country, street and garden, which is often to be seen in a small 
English town. 

I went the way he had turned me, and I came to the Beer-shop 
with the sign of The First and Last, and was out of the town on 
the old London road. I came to the Turnpike, and I found it, in 
its silent way, eloquent respecting the change that had fallen on the 
road. The Turnpike-house was all overgrown with ivy ; and the 
Turnpike-keeper, unable to get a living out of the tolls, plied the 
trade of a cobbler. Not only that, but his wife sold ginger-beer, 
and, in the very window of espial through which the Toll-takers 
of old times used with awe to behold the grand London coaches 
coming on at a gallop, exhibited for sale little barber's-poles of 
sweetstuff in a sticky lantern. 

The political economy of the master of the turnpike thus expressed 
itself. 

" How goes turnpike business, master ? " said I to him, as he sat 
in his little porch, repairing a shoe. 

" It don't go at all, master," said he to me. " It's stopped." 

" That's bad," said I. 

" Bad ? " he repeated. And he pointed to one of his sunburnt 
dusty children who was climbing the turnpike-gate, and said, ex- 
tending his open right hand in remonstrance with Universal Nature, 
" Five on 'em ! " 

" But how to improve Turnpike business ? " said I. 

" There's a way, master," said he, with the air of one who had 
thought deeply on the subject. 

" I should like to know it." 

"Lay a toll on everything as comes through; lay a toll on 
walkers. Lay another toll on everything as don't come through ; 
lay a toll on them as stops at home." 

" Would the last remedy be fair ? " 

"Fair? Them as stops at home, could come through if they 
liked ; couldn't they ? " 

" Say they could." 

"Toll 'em. If they don't come through, it's their look out. 
Anyways, — Toll 'em ! " 

Finding it was as impossible to argue with this financial genius 



214 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

as if he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, and consequently 
the right man in the right place, I passed on meekly. 

My mind now began to misgive me that the disappointed coach- 
maker had sent me on a wild-goose errand, and that there was no 
post-chaise in those parts. But coming within view of certain allot- 
ment-gardens by the roadside, I retracted the suspicion, and con- 
fessed that I had done him an injustice. For, there I saw, surely, 
the poorest superannuated post-chaise left on earth. 

It was a post-chaise taken off its axletree and wheels, and plumped 
down on the clayey soil among a ragged growth of vegetables. It 
was a post-chaise not even set straight upon the ground, but tilted 
over, as if it had fallen out of a balloon. It was a post-chaise that 
had been a long time in those decayed circumstances, and against 
which scarlet beans were trained. It was a post-chaise patched 
and mended with old teatrays, or with scraps of iron that looked 
like them, and boarded up as to the windows, but having a knockek 
on the off-side door. Whether it was a post-chaise used as tool- 
house, summer-house, or dwelling-house, I could not discover, for 
there was nobody at home at the post-chaise when I knocked ; but 
it was certainly used for something, and locked up. In the wonder 
of this discovery, I walked round and round the post-chaise many 
times, and sat down by the post-chaise, waiting for further eluci- 
dation. None came. At last, I made my way back to the old 
London road by the further end of the allotment-gardens, and 
consequently at a point beyond that from which I had diverged. 
I had to scramble through a hedge and down a steep bank, and I 
nearly came down a-top of a little spare man who sat breaking 
stones by the roadside. 

He stayed his hammer, and said, regarding me mysteriously 
through his dark goggles of wire : 

" Are you aware, sir, that you've been trespassing ? " 

"I turned out of the way," said I, in explanation, "to look at 
that odd post-chaise. Do you happen to know anything about it ? " 

"I know it was many a year upon the road," said he. 

" So I supposed. Do you know to whom it belongs 1 " 

The stone-breaker bent his brows and goggles over his heap of 
stones, as if he were considering whether he should answer the 
question or not. Then, raising his barred eyes to my features as 
before, he said : 

" To me." 

Being quite unprepared for the reply, I received it with a suflS- 
ciently awkward " Indeed ! Dear me ! " Presently I added, " Do 

you " I was going to say " live there," but it seemed so absurd 

a question, that I substituted "live near here?" 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 215 

The stone-breaker, who had not broken a fragment since we 
began to converse, then did as follows. He raised himself by 
poising his figure on his hammer, and took his coat, on which he 
had been seated, over his arm. He then backed to an easier part 
of the bank than that by which I had come down, keeping his 
dark goggles silently upon me all the time, and then shouldered 
his hammer, suddenly turned, ascended, and was gone. His face 
was so small, and his goggles were so large, that he left me wholly 
uninformed as to his countenance ; but he left me a profound 
impression that the curved legs I had seen from behind as he van- 
ished, were the legs of an old postboy. It was not until then that 
I noticed he had been working by a grass-grown milestone, which 
looked like a tombstone erected over the grave of the London road. 

My dinner-hour being close at hand, I had no leisure to pursue 
the goggles or the subject then, but made my way back to the 
Dolphin's Head. In the gateway I found J. Mellows, looking at 
nothing, and apparently experiencing that it failed to raise his 
spirits. 

"/ don't care for the town," said J. Mellows, when I compli- 
mented him on the sanitary advantages it may or may not possess ; 
" I wish I had never seen the town ! " 

"You don't belong to it, Mr. Mellows?" 

" Belong to it ! " repeated Mellows. "If I didn't belong to a 
better style of town than this, I'd take and drown myself in a 
pail." It then occurred to me that Mellows, having so little to 
do, was habitually thrown back on his internal resources — by 
which I mean the Dolphin's cellar. 

"What we want," said Mellows, pulling off his hat, and making 
as if he emptied it of the last load of Disgust that had exuded 
from his brain, before he put it on again for another load ; "what 
we want, is a Branch. The Petition for the Branch Bill is in the 
coffee-room. Would you put your name to it ? Every little helps." 

I found the document in question stretched out flat on the 
coffee-room table by the aid of certain weights from the kitchen, 
and I gave it the additional weight of my uncommercial signature. 
To the best of my belief, I bound myself to the modest statement 
that universal traffic, happiness, prosperity, and civilisation, to- 
gether with unbounded national triumph in competition with the 
foreigner, would infallibly flow from the Branch. 

Having achieved this constitutional feat, I asked Mr. Mellows if 
he could grace my dinner with a pint of good wine ? Mr. Mellows 
thus replied : 

" If I couldn't give you a pint of good wine, I'd — there ! — I'd 
take and drown myself in a pail. But I was deceived when I 



216 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

bought this business, and the stock was higgledy-piggledy, and I 
haven't yet tasted my way quite through it with a view to sorting 
it. Therefore, if you order one kind and get another, change till 
it comes right. For what," said Mellows, unloading his hat as 
before, " what would you or any gentleman do, if you ordered one 
kind of wine and was required to drink another? Why, you'd 
(and naturally and properly, having the feelings of a gentleman), 
you'd take and drown yourself in a pail ! " 



All the Year Bound, Vol. 9, No. 225, Aug. 15, 1863. 
XXV. 

THE BOILED BEEF OF NEW ENGLAND. 

The shabbiness of our English capital, as compared with Paris, 
Bordeaux, Frankfort, Milan, Geneva — almost any important town 
on the continent of Europe — I find very striking after an absence 
of any duration in foreign parts. London is shabby in contrast 
with Edinburgh, with Aberdeen, with Exeter, with Liverpool, with 
a bright little town like Bury St. Edmunds. London is shabby 
in contrast with New York, with Boston, with Philadelphia. In 
detail, one would say it can rarely fail to be a disappointing piece 
of shabbiness, to a stranger from any of those places. There is 
nothing shabbier than Drury-lane, in Rome itself. The meanness 
of Regent-street, set against the great line of Boulevarts in Paris, 
is as striking as the abortive ugliness of Trafalgar-square, set 
against the gallant beauty of the Place de la Concorde. London 
is shabby by daylight, and shabbier by gaslight. No Englishman 
knows what gaslight is, until he sees the Rue de Rivoli and the 
Palais Royal after dark. 

The mass of London people are shabby. The absence of dis- 
tinctive dress has, no doubt, something to do with it. The porters 
of the Vintners' Company, the draymen, and the butchers, are about 
the only people who wear distinctive dresses ; and even these do 
not wear them on holidays. We have nothing which for cheap- 
ness, cleanliness, convenience, or picturesqueness, can compare with 
the belted blouse. As to our women ; — next Easter or Whitsun- 
tide, look at the bonnets at the British Museum or the National 
Gallery, and think of the pretty white French cap, the Spanish 
mantilla, or the Genoese mezzero. 

Probably there are not more second-hand clothes sold in London 
than in Paris, and yet the mass of the London population have a 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 217 

second-hand look which is not to be detected on the mass of the 
Parisian population. I think this is mainly because a Parisian 
workman does not in the least trouble himself about what is worn 
by a Parisian idler, but dresses in the way of his own class, and 
for his own comfort. In London, on the contrary, the fashions 
descend ; and you never fully know how inconvenient or ridiculous 
a fashion is, until you see it in its last descent. It was but the 
other day, on a race-course, that I observed four people in a 
barouche deriving great entertainment from the contemplation of 
four people on foot. The four people on foot were two young 
men and two young women ; the four people in the barouche were 
two young men and two young women. The four young women 
were dressed in exactly the same style ; the four young men were 
dressed in exactly the same style. Yet the two couples on wheels 
were as much amused by the two couples on foot, as if they were 
quite unconscious of having themselves set those fashions, or of 
being at that very moment engaged in the display of them. 

Is it only in the matter of clothes that fashion descends here in 
London — and consequently in England — and thence shabbiness 
arises 1 Let us think a little, and be just. The " Black Country " 
round about Birmingham, is a very black country; but is it quite 
as black as it has been lately painted? An appalling accident 
happened at the People's Park near Birmingham, this last July, 
when it was crowded with people from the Black Country — an 
appalling accident consequent on a shamefully dangerous exhibi- 
tion. Did the shamefully dangerous exhibition originate in the 
moral blackness of the Black Country, and in the Black People's 
peculiar love of the excitement attendant on great personal hazard, 
which they looked on at, but in which they did not participate 1 
Light is much wanted in the Black Country. we are all agreed 
on that. But, we must not quite forget the crowds of gentlefolks 
who set the shamefully dangerous fashion, either. We must not 
quite forget the enterprising Directors of an Institution vaunting 
mighty educational pretences, who made the low sensation as 
strong as they possibly could make it, by hanging the Blondin 
rope as high as they possibly could hang it. All this must not be 
eclipsed in the Blackness of the Black Country. The reserved 
seats high up by the rope, the cleared space below it, so that no 
one should be smashed but the performer, the pretence of slipping 
and falling off, the baskets for the feet and the sack for the head, 
the photographs everywhere, and the virtuous indignation nowhere 
— all this must not be wholly swallowed up in the blackness of 
the jet-black country. 

Whatsoever fashion is set in England, is certain to descend. 



218 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

This is a text for a perpetual sermon on care in setting fashions. 
When you find a fashion low down, look back for the time (it will 
never be far off) when it was the fashion high up. This is the 
text for a perpetual sermon on social justice. From imitations of 
Ethiopian Serenaders, to imitations of Prince's coats and waistcoats, 
you will find the original model in St. James's Parish. When the 
Serenaders become tiresome, trace them beyond the Black Country ; 
when the coats and waistcoats become insupportable, refer them to 
their source in the Upper Toady Regions. 

Gentlemen's clubs were once maintained for purposes of savage 
party warfare ; working men's clubs of the same day assumed the 
same character. Gentlemen's clubs became places of quiet inof- 
fensive recreation; working men's clubs began to follow suit. If 
working men have seemed rather slow to appreciate advantages of 
combination which have saved the pockets of gentlemen, and en- 
hanced their comforts, it is because working men could scarcely, 
for want of capital, originate such combinations without help; 
and because help has not been separable from that great imperti- 
nence. Patronage. The instinctive revolt of his spirit against 
patronage, is a quality much to be respected in the English work- 
ing man. It is the base of the base of his best qualities. Nor is 
it surprising that he should be unduly suspicious of patronage, and 
sometimes resentful of it even where it is not, seeing what a flood 
of washy talk has been let loose on his devoted head, or with what 
complacent condescension the same devoted head has been smoothed 
and patted. It is a proof to me of his self-control that he never 
strikes out pugilistically, right and left, when addressed as one of 
"My friends," or "My assembled friends;" that he does not 
become inappeasable, and run amuck like a Malay, whenever he 
sees a biped in broadcloth getting on a platform to talk to him ; 
that any pretence of improving his mind, does not instantly drive 
him out of his mind, and cause him to toss his obliging patron like 
a mad bull. 

For, how often have I heard the unfortunate working man lect- 
ured, as if he were a little charity-child, humid as to his nasal 
development, strictly literal as to his Catechism, and called by 
Providence to walk all his days in a station in life represented on 
festive occasions by a mug of warm milk-and-water and a bun ! 
What popguns of jokes have these ears tingled to hear let ofi" at 
him, what asinine sentiments, what impotent conclusions, what 
spelling-book moralities, what adaptations of the orator's insuffer- 
able tediousness to the assumed level of his understanding ! If 
his sledge-hammers, his spades and pick-axes, his saws and chisels, 
his paint-pots and brushes, his forges, furnaces, and engines, the 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 219 

horses that he drove at his work, and the machines that drove 
him at his work, were all toys in one little paper box, and he the 
baby who played with them, he could not have been discoursed to, 
more impertinently and absurdly than I have heard him discoursed 
to times innumerable. Consequently, not being a fool or a fawner, 
he has come to acknowledge his patronage by virtually saying : 
" Let me alone. If you understand me no better than that, sir 
and madam, let me alone. You mean very well, I dare say, but I 
don't like it, and I won't come here again to have any more of it." 

Whatever is done for the comfort and advancement of the work- 
ing man must be so far done by himself as that it is maintained 
by himself And there must be in it no touch of condescension, 
no shadow of patronage. In the great working districts, this 
truth is studied and understood. When the American civil war 
rendered it necessary, first in Glasgow, and afterwards in Man- 
chester, that the working people should be shown how to avail 
themselves of the advantages derivable from system, and from the 
combination of numbers, in the purchase and the cooking of their 
food, this truth was above all things borne in mind. The quick 
consequence was, that suspicion and reluctance were vanquished, 
and that the ejQfort resulted in an astonishing and a complete 
success. 

Such thoughts passed through my mind on a July morning of 
this summer, as I walked towards Commercial-street (not Uncom- 
mercial-street), Whitechapel. The Glasgow and Manchester system 
had been lately set a going there, by certain gentlemen who felt an 
interest in its dififusion, and I had been attracted by the following 
hand-bill printed on rose-coloured paper : 

SELF-SUPPORTING 

COOKING DEPOT 

FOR THE WORiaNG CLASSES, 

Commercial-street, Whitechapel, 

Where Accommodation is provided for Dining comfortably 300 Persons 

at a time. 

Open from 7 a.m. till 7 p.m. 

PRICES. 

All Articles of the Best Quality. 

Cup of Tea or Coffee ... One Penny 

Bread and Butter ... One Penny 

Bread and Cheese One Penny 

Slice of Bread • • • One half -penny or One Penny 

Boiled Egg One Penny 

Ginger Beer One Penny 

The above Articles always ready. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 



Besides the above may be had, from 12 to 3 o'clock, 



Bowl of Scotch Broth 
Bowl of Soup 
Plate of Potatoes 
Plate of Minced Beef 
Plate of Cold Beef 
Plate of Cold Ham 
Plate of Plum Puddin; 



One Penny 
One Penny 
One Penny 
Twopence 
Twopence 
Twopence 
One Penny 



J or Rice 

As the Economy of Cookmg depends greatly upon the simplicity 
of the arrangements with which a great number of persons can be 
served at one time, the Upper Room of this Establishment will 
be especially set apart for a 

Public DINNER every Day 

Erom 12 till 3 o'clock. 

Consisting of the following Dishes : 

Bowl of Broth, or Soup, 
Plate of Cold Beef or Ham, 
Plate of Potatoes, 
Plum Pudding, or Rice, 

FIXED CHARGE 4| d. 

THE DAILY PAPERS PROVIDED, 

N.B. — This Establishment is conducted on the strictest busi- 
ness principles, with the full intention of making it self-support- 
ing, so that every one may frequent it with a feeling of perfect 
independence. 

The assistance of all frequenting the Depot is confidently ex- 
pected in checking anything interfering with the comfort, quiet, 
and regularity of the establishment. 

Please do not destroy this Hand Bill, but hand it to some other 
person whom it may interest. 

This Self-Supporting Cooking Depot (not a very good name, and 
one would rather give it an English one) had hired a newly-built 
warehouse that it found to let ; therefore it was not established in 
premises specially designed for the purpose. But, at a small cost 
they were exceedingly well adapted to the purpose : being light, 
well ventilated, clean, and cheerful. They consisted of three large 
rooms. That on the basement story was the kitchen ; that on the 
ground floor was the general dining-room ; that on the floor above 
was the Upper Room referred to in the hand-bill, where the Public 
Dinner at fourpence-halfpenny a head was provided every day. 
The cooking was done, with much economy of space and fuel, by 
American cooking-stoves, and by young women not previously 
brought up as cooks ; the walls and pillars of the two dining-rooms 
were agreeably brightened with ornamental colours ; the tables 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 221 

were capable of accommodating six or eight persons each ; the 
attendants were all young women, becomingly and neatly dressed, 
and dressed alike. I think the whole staff was female, with the 
exception of the steward or manager. 

My first inquiries were directed to the wages of this staff; be- 
cause, if any establishment claiming to be self-Bupporting, live upon 
the spoliation of anybody or anything, or eke out a feeble existence 
by poor mouths and beggarly resources (as too many so-called Me- 
chanics' Institutions do), I make bold to express my Uncommercial 
opinion that it has no business to live, and had better die. It was 
made clear to me by the account books, that every person employed 
was properly paid. My next inquiries were directed to the quality 
of the provisions purchased, and to the terms on which they were 
bought. It was made equally clear to me that the quality was the 
very best, and that all bills were paid weekly. My next inquiries 
were directed to the balance-sheet for the last two weeks ■ — only 
the third and fourth of the establishment's career. It was made 
equally clear to me, that after everything bought was paid for, and 
after each week was charged with its full share of wages, rent and 
taxes, depreciation of plant in use, and interest on capital at the 
rate of four per cent per annum, the last week had yielded a profit 
of (in round numbers) one pound ten ; and the previous week a 
profit of six pounds ten. By this time I felt that I had a healthy 
appetite for the dinners. 

It had just struck twelve, and a quick succession of faces had 
already begun to appear at a little window in the wall of the par- 
titioned space where I sat looking over the books. Within this 
little window, like a pay-box at a theatre, a neat and brisk young 
woman presided to take money and issue tickets. Every one com- 
ing in must take a ticket. Either the fourpence-halfpenny ticket 
for the upper room (the most popular ticket, I think), or a penny 
ticket for a bowl of soup, or as many penny tickets as he or she 
chose to buy. For three penny tickets one had quite a wide range 
of choice. A plate of cold boiled beef and potatoes ; or a plate of 
cold ham and potatoes ; or a plate of hot minced beef and potatoes ; 
or a bowl of soup, bread and cheese, and a plate of plum-pudding. 
Touching what they should have, some customers on taking their 
seats fell into a reverie — became mildly distracted — postponed 
decision, and said in bewilderment, they would think of it. One 
old man I noticed when I sat among the tables in the lower room, 
who was startled by the bill of fare, and sat contemplating it as if 
it were something of a ghostly nature. The decision of the boys 
was as rapid as their execution, and always included pudding. 

There were several women among the diners, and several clerks 



222 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

and shopmen. There were carpenters and painters from the neigh- 
bouring buildings under repair, and there were nautical men, and 
there were, as one diner observed to me, "some of most sorts." 
Some were solitary, some came two together, some dined in parties 
of three or four, or six. The latter talked together, but assuredly 
no one was louder than at my club in Pall-Mali. One young fellow 
whistled in rather a shrill manner while he waited for his dinner, 
but I was gratified to observe that he did so in evident defiance of 
my Uncommercial individuality. Quite agreeing with him, on con- 
sideration, that I had no business to be there, unless I dined like 
the rest, I "went in," as the phrase is, for fourpence-halfpenny. 

The room of the fourpence-halfpenny banquet had, like the lower 
room, a counter in it, on which were ranged a great number of cold 
portions ready for distribution. Behind this counter, the fragrant 
soup was steaming in deep cans, and the best-cooked of potatoes 
were fished out of similar receptacles. Nothing to eat was touched 
with the hand. Every waitress had her own tables to attend to. 
As soon as she saw a new customer seat himself at one of her 
tables, she took from the counter all his dinner — his soup, pota- 
toes, meat, and pudding — piled it up dexterously in her two hands, 
set it before him, and took his ticket. This serving of the whole 
dinner at once, had been found greatly to simplify the business of 
attendance, and was also popular with the customers : who were 
thus enabled to vary the meal by varying the routine of dishes : 
beginning with soup to-day, putting soup in the middle to-morrow, 
putting soup at the end the day after to-morrow, and ringing simi- 
lar changes on meat and pudding. The rapidity with which every 
new comer got served, was remarkable ; and the dexterity with 
which the waitresses (quite new to the art a month before) dis- 
charged their duty, was as agreeable to see, as the neat smartness 
with which they wore their dress and had dressed their hair. 

If I seldom saw better waiting, so I certainly never ate better 
meat, potatoes, or pudding. And the soup was an honest and 
stout soup, with rice and barley in it, and "little matters for the 
teeth to touch," as had been observed to me by my friend below 
stairs already quoted. The dinner-service, too, was neither con- 
spicuously hideous for High Art nor for Low Art, but was of a 
pleasant and pure appearance. Concerning the viands and their 
cookery, one last remark. I dined at my club in Pail-Mall afore- 
said, a few days afterwards, for exactly twelve times the money, 
and not half as well. 

The company thickened after one o'clock struck, and changed 
pretty quickly. Although experience of the place had been so 
recently attainable, and although there was still considerable curi- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 223 

osity out in the street and about the entrance, the general tone 
was as good as could be, and the customers fell easily into the 
ways of the place. It was clear to me, however, that they were 
there to have what they paid for, and to be on an independent 
footing. To the best of my judgment, they might be patronised 
out of the building in a month. With judicious visiting, and by 
dint of being questioned, read to, and talked at, they might even 
be got rid of (for the next quarter of a century) in half the time. 

This disinterested and wise movement is fraught with so many 
wholesome changes in the lives of the working people, and with so 
much good in the way of overcoming that suspicion which our own 
unconscious impertinence has engendered, that it is scarcely gra- 
cious to criticise details as yet; the rather, because it is indispu- 
table that the managers of the Whitechapel establishment most 
thoroughly feel that they are upon their honour with the customers, 
as to the minutest points of administration. But, although the 
American stoves .cannot roast, they can surely boil one kind of 
meat as well as another, and need not always circumscribe their 
boiling talents within the limits of ham and beef. The most en- 
thusiastic admirer of those substantials, would probably not object 
to occasional inconstancy in respect of pork and mutton : or, es- 
pecially in cold weather, to a little innocent trifling with Irish 
stews, meat pies, and toads in holes. Another drawback on the 
Whitechapel establishment, is the absence of beer. Regarded 
merely as a question of policy, it is very impolitic, as having a 
tendency to send the working men to the public-house, where gin 
is reported to be sold. But, there is a much higher ground on 
which this absence of beer is objectionable. It expresses distrust 
of the working man. It is a fragment of that old mantle of pat- 
ronage in which so many estimable Thugs, so darkly wandering up 
and down the moral world, are sworn to muffle him. Good beer is 
a good thing for him, he says, and he likes it ; the Depot could 
give it him good, and he now gets it bad. Why does the Depot 
not give it him good 1 Because he would get drunk. Why does the 
Depot not let him have a pint with his dinner, which would not 
make him drunk ? Because he might have had another pint, or 
another two pints, before he came. Now, this distrust is an affront, 
is exceedingly inconsistent with the confidence the managers ex- 
press in their hand-bills, and is a timid stopping-short upon the 
straight highway. It is unjust and unreasonable, also. It is un- 
just, because it punishes the sober man for the vice of the drunken 
man. It is unreasonable, because any one at all experienced in 
such things knows that the drunken workman does not get drunk 
where he goes to eat and drink, but where he goes to drink — ex- 



224 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

pressly to drink. To suppose that the working man cannot state 
this question to himself quite as plainly as I state it here, is to 
suppose that he is a baby, and is again to tell him in the old weari- 
some condescending patronising way that he must be goody-poody, 
and do as he is toldy-poldy, and not be a manny-panny or a voter- 
poter, but fold his handy-pandys, and be a childy-pildy. 

I found from the accounts of the Whitechapel Self-Supporting 
Cooking Depot, that every article sold in it, even at the prices I 
have quoted, yields a certain small profit ! Individual speculators 
are of course already in the field, and are of course already appro- 
priating the name. The classes for whose benefit the real depots 
are designed, will distinguish between the two kinds of enterprise. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 10, No. 227, Aug. 29, 1863. 
XXVI. 

CHATHAM DOCKYAED. 

Theee are some small out-of-the-way landing-places on the 
Thames and the Medway, where I do much of my summer idling. 
Eunning water is favourable to day-dreams, and a strong tidal river 
is the best of running water for mine. I like to watch the great 
ships standing out to sea or coming home richly laden, the active 
little steam-tugs confidently puffing with them to and from the sea- 
horizon, the fleet of barges that seem to have plucked their brown 
and russet sails from the ripe trees in the landscape, the heavy old 
colliers, light in ballast, floundering down before the tide, the light 
screw barks and schooners imperiously holding a straight course 
while the others patiently tack and go about, the yachts with their 
tiny hulls and great white sheets of canvas, the little sailing-boats 
bobbing to and fro on their errands of pleasure or business, and — 
as it is the nature of little people to do — making a prodigious fuss 
about their small affairs. Watching these objects, I still am under 
no obligation to think about them, or even so much as to see them, 
unless it perfectly suits my humour. As little am I obliged to 
hear the plash and flop of the tide, the ripple at my feet, the clink- 
ing windlass afar off, or the humming steam-ship paddles further 
away yet. These, with the creaking little jetty on which I sit, 
and the gaunt high-water marks and low- water marks in the mud, 
and the broken causeway, and the broken bank, and the broken 
stakes and piles leaning forward as if they were vain of their per- 
sonal appearance and looking for their reflection in the water, will 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 225 

melt into any train of fancy. Equally adaptable to any purpose or 
to none, are the pasturing sheep and kine upon the marshes, the 
gulls that wheel and dip around me, the crows (well out of gunshot) 
going home from the rich harvest-fields, the heron that has been 
out a fishing and looks as melancholy, up there in the sky, as if it 
hadn't agreed with him. Everything within the range of the senses 
will, by the aid of the running water, lend itself to everything 
beyond that range, and work into a drowsy whole, not unlike a 
kind of tune, but for which there is no exact definition. 

One of these landing-places is near an old fort (I can see the 
Nore Light from it with my pocket-glass), from which fort mysteri- 
ously emerges a boy, to whom I am much indebted for additions to 
my scanty stock of knowledge. He is a young boy, with an intelli- 
gent face burnt to a dust colour by the summer sun, and with crisp 
hair of the same hue. He is a boy in whom I have perceived noth- 
ing incompatible with habits of studious inquiry and meditation, 
unless an evanescent black eye (I was delicate of inquiring how 
occasioned) should be so considered. To him am I indebted for 
ability to identify a Custom-house boat at any distance, and for ac- 
quaintance with all the forms and ceremonies observed by a home- 
ward bound Indiaman coming up the river, when the Custom-house 
officers go aboard her. But for him, I might never have heard of 
"the dumb-ague," respecting which malady I am now learned. 
Had I never sat at his feet, I might have finished my mortal career 
and never known that when I see a white horse on a barge's sail, 
that barge is a lime barge. For precious secrets in reference to 
beer, am I likewise beholden to him, involving warning against the 
beer of a certain establishment, by reason of its having turned sour 
through failure in point of demand ; though my young sage is not 
of opinion that similar deterioration has befallen the ale. He has 
also enlightened me touching the mushrooms of the marshes, and 
has gently reproved my ignorance in having supposed them to be 
impregnated with salt. His manner of imparting information, is 
thoughtful, and appropriate to the scene. As he reclines beside 
me, he pitches into the river, a little stone or piece of grit, and then 
delivers himself oracularly, as though he spoke out of the centre 
of the spreading circle that it makes in the water. He never im- 
proves my mind without observing this formula. 

With the wise boy — whom I know by no other name than the 
Spirit of the Fort — I recently consorted on a breezy day when 
the river leaped about us and was full of life. I had seen the 
sheaved corn carrying in the golden fields as I came down to 
the river ; and the rosy farmer, watching his labouring-men in the 
saddle on his cob, had told me how he had reaped his two hundred 



226 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

and sixty acres of long-strawed corn last week, and how a better 
week's work he had never done in all his days. Peace and abun- 
dance were on the country-side in beautiful forms and beautiful col- 
ours, and the harvest seemed even to be sailing out to grace the never- 
reaped sea in the yellow-laden barges that mellowed the distance. 

It was on this occasion that the Spirit of the Fort, directing his 
remarks to a certain floating iron battery lately lying in that reach of 
the river, enriched my mind with his opinions on naval architecture, 
and informed me that he would like to be an engineer. I found 
him up to everything that is done in the contracting line by Messrs. 
Peto and Brassey — cunning in the article of concrete — mellow 
in the matter of iron — great on the subject of gunnery. When 
he spoke of pile-driving and sluice-making, he left me not a leg to 
stand on, and I can never sufiiciently acknowledge his forbearance 
with me in my disabled state. While he thus discoursed, he sev- 
eral times directed his eyes to one distant quarter of the landscape, 
and spoke with vague mysterious awe of "the Yard." Pondering 
his lessons after we had parted, I bethought me that the Yard was 
one of our large public Dockyards, and that it lay hidden among 
the crops down in the dip behind the windmills, as if it modestly 
kept itself out of view in peaceful times, and sought to trouble no 
man. Taken with this modesty on the part of the Yard, I resolved 
to improve the Yard's acquaintance. 

My good opinion of the Yard's retiring character was not dashed 
by nearer approach. It resounded with the noise of hammers beat- 
ing upon iron ; and the great sheds or slips under which the mighty 
men-of-war are built, loomed business-like when contemplated from 
the opposite side of the river. For all that, however, the Yard 
made no display, but kept itself snug under hill-sides of corn-fields, 
hop-gardens, and orchards ; its great chimneys smoking with a 
quiet — almost a lazy — air, like giants smoking tobacco ; and the 
great Shears moored off" it, looking meekly and inoff'ensively out of 
proportion, like the Giraffe of the machinery creation. The store 
of cannon on the neighbouring gun-wharf, had an innocent toy-like 
appearance, and the one red-coated sentry on duty over them was 
a mere toy figure, with a clock-work movement. As the hot sun- 
light sparkled on him he might have passed for the identical little 
man who had the little gun, and whose bullets they were made of 
lead, lead, lead. 

Crossing the river and landing at the Stairs, where a drift of 
chips and weed had been trying to land before me and had not 
succeeded, but had got into a corner instead, I found the very 
street posts to be cannon, and the architectural ornaments to be 
shells. And so I came to the Yard, which was shut up tight and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 227 

strong with great folded gates, like an enormous patent safe. These 
gates devouring me, I became digested into the Yard ; and it had, 
at first, a clean-swept holiday air, as if it had given over work 
until next war-time. Though indeed a quantity of hemp for rope 
was tumbling out of store-houses, even there, which would hardly 
be lying like so much hay on the white stones if the Yard were as 
placid as it pretended. 

Ding, Clash, Dong, Bang, Boom, Rattle, Clash, Bang, Clink, 
Bang, Dong, Bang, Clatter, bang, bang, BANG ! What on 
earth is this ! This is, or soon will be, the Achilles, iron armour- 
plated ship. Twelve hundred men are working at her now ; twelve 
hundred men working on stages over her sides, over her bows, 
over her stern, under her keel, between her decks, down in 
her hold, within her and without, crawling and creeping into 
the finest curves of her lines wherever it is possible for men to 
twist. Twelve hundred hammerers, measurers, caulkers, armourers, 
forgers, smiths, shipwrights ; twelve hundred dingers, dashers, 
dongers, rattlers, clinkers, bangers bangers bangers ! Yet all 
this stupendous uproar around the rising Achilles is as nothing 
to the reverberations with which the perfected Achilles shall re- 
sound upon the dreadful day when the full work is in hand for 
which this is but note of preparation — the day when the scuppers 
that are now fitting like great dry thirsty conduit-pipes, shall run 
red. All these busy figures between decks, dimly seen bending at 
their work in smoke and fire, are as nothing to the figures that 
shall do work here of another kind in smoke and fire, that day. 
These steam-worked engines alongside, helping the ship by travel- 
ling to and fro, and wafting tons of iron plates about, as though 
they were so many leaves of trees, would be rent limb from limb 
if they stood by her for a minute then. To think that this Achilles, 
monstrous compound of iron tank and oaken chest, can ever swim 
or roll ! To think that any force of wind and wave could ever 
break her ! To think that wherever I see a glowing red-hot iron 
point thrust out of her side from within — as I do now, there, and 
there, and there ! — aind two watching men on a stage without, 
with bared arms and sledge-hammers, strike at it fiercely, and re- 
peat their blows until it is black and flat, I see a rivet being driven 
home, of which there are many in every iron plate, and thousands 
upon thousands in the ship ! To think that the difficulty I ex- 
perience in appreciating the ship's size when I am on board, arises 
from her being a series of iron tanks and oaken chests, so that 
internally she is ever finishing and ever beginning, and half of her 
might be smashed, and yet the remaining half suffice and be sound. 
Then, to go over the side again and down among the ooze and wet 



228 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

to the bottom of the dock, in the depths of the subterranean forest 
of dog-shores and stays that hold her up, and to see the immense 
mass bulging out against the upper light, and tapering down 
towards me, is, with great pains and much clambering, to arrive 
at an impossibility of realising that this is a ship at all, and to 
become possessed by the fancy that it is an enormous immovable 
edifice set up in an ancient amphitheatre (say, that at Verona), and 
almost filling it ! Yet what would even these things be, without 
the tributary workshops and the mechanical powers for piercing 
the iron plates — four inches and a half thick — for rivets, shaping 
them under hydraulic pressure to the finest tapering turns of the 
ship's lines, and paring them away, with knives shaped like the 
beaks of strong and cruel birds, to the nicest requirements of 
the design ! These machines of tremendous force, so easily directed 
by one attentive face and presiding hand, seem to me to have in 
them something of the retiring character of the Yard. " Obedient 
monster, please to bite this mass of iron through and through, at 
equal distances, where these regular chalk-marks are, all round." 
Monster looks at its work, and lifting its ponderous head, replies, 

" I don't particularly want to do it ; but if it must be done ! " 

The solid metal wriggles out, hot from the monster's crunching 
tooth, and it is done. "Dutiful monster, observe this other mass 
of iron. It is required to be pared away, according to this deli- 
cately lessening and arbitrary line, which please to look at." 
Monster (who has been in a reverie) brings down its blunt head, 
and, much in the manner of Doctor Johnson, closely looks along 
the line — very closely, being somewhat near-sighted. "I don't 
particularly want to do it ; but if it must be done ! " Mon- 
ster takes another near-sighted look, takes aim, and the tortured 
piece writhes off, and falls, a hot tight-twisted snake, among the 
ashes. The making of the rivets is merely a pretty round game, 
played by a man and a boy, who put red-hot barley sugar in a Pope 
Joan board, and immediately rivets fall out of window; but the 
tone of the great machines is the tone of the great Yard and the 
great country: "We don't particularly want to do it; but if it 

must be done ! " 

How such a prodigious mass as the Achilles can ever be held by 
such comparatively little anchors as those intended for her and 
lying near her here, is a mystery of seamanship which I will refer 
to the wise boy. For my own part, I should as soon have thought 
of tethering an elephant to a tent-peg, or the larger hippopotamus 
in the Zoological Gardens to my shirt-pin. Yonder in the river, 
alongside a hulk, lie two of this ship's hollow iron masts. They 
are large enough for the eye, I find, and so are all her other appli- 
ances. I wonder why only her anchors look small. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 229 

I have no present time to think about it, for I am going to see 
the workshops where they make all the oars used in the British 
Navy. A pretty large pile of building, I opine, and a pretty long 
job ! As to the building, I am soon disappointed, because the 
work is all done in one loft. And as to a long job — what is this ? 
Two rather large mangles with a swarm of butterflies hovering over 
them ? What can there be in the mangles that attracts butterflies ? 

Drawing nearer, I discern that these are not mangles, but intri- 
cate machines, set with knives and saws and planes, which cut 
smooth and straight here, and slantwise there, and now cut such 
a depth, and now miss cutting altogether, according to the pre- 
destined requirements of the pieces of wood that are pushed on 
below them : each of which pieces is to be an oar, and is roughly 
adapted to that purpose before it takes its final leave of far-off 
forests, and sails for England. Likewise I discern that the butter- 
flies are not true butterflies, but wooden shavings, which, being 
spirted up from the wood by the violence of the machinery, and 
kept in rapid and not equal movement by the impulse of its rota- 
tion on the air, flutter and play, and rise and fall, and conduct 
themselves as like butterflies as heart could wish. Suddenly the 
noise and motion cease, and the butterflies drop dead. An oar has 
been made since I came in, wanting the shaped handle. As quickly 
as I can follow it with my eye and thought, the same oar is carried 
to a turning lathe. A whirl and a Nick ! Handle made. Oar 
finished. 

The exquisite beauty and efiiciency of this machinery need no 
illustration, but happen to have a pointed illustration to-day. A 
pair of oars of unusual size chance to be wanted for a special 
purpose, and they have to be made by hand. Side by side with 
the subtle and facile machine, and side by side with the fast- 
growing pile of oars on the floor, a man shapes out these special 
oars with an axe. Attended by no butterflies, and chipping and 
dinting, by comparison as leisurely as if he were a labouring Pagan 
getting them ready against his decease at threescore and ten, to 
take with him as a present to Charon for his boat, the man (aged 
about thirty) plies his task. The machine would make a regula- 
tion oar while the man wipes his forehead. The man might be 
buried in a mound made of the strips of thin broad wooden ribbon . 
torn from the wood whirled into oars as the minutes fall from the 
clock, before he had done a forenoon's work with his axe. 

Passing from this wonderful sight to the Ships again — for my 
heart, as to the Yard, is where the ships are — I notice certain 
unfinished wooden walls left seasoning on the stocks, pending the 
solution of the merits of the wood and iron question, and having 



230 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

an air of biding their time with surly confidence. The names of 
these worthies are set up beside them, together with their capacity 
in guns — a custom highly conducive to ease and satisfaction in 
social intercourse, if it could be adapted to mankind. By a plank 
more gracefully pendulous than substantial, I make bold to go 
aboard a transport ship (iron screw) just sent in from the contrac- 
tor's yard to be inspected and passed. She is a very gratifying 
experience, in the simplicity and humanity of her arrangements 
for troops, in her provision for light and air and cleanliness, and 
in her care for women and children. It occurs to me, as I explore 
her, that I would require a handsome sum of money to go aboard 
her, at midnight by the Dockyard bell, and stay aboard alone till 
morning ; for surely she must be haunted by a crowd of ghosts of 
obstinate old martinets, mournfully flapping their cherubic epau- 
lettes over the changed times. Though still we may learn from 
the astounding ways and means in our Yards now, more liighly than 
ever to respect the forefathers who got to sea, and fought the sea, 
and held the sea, without them. This remembrance putting me 
in the best of tempers with an old hulk, very green as to her 
copper, and generally dim and patched, I pull off my hat to her. 
Which salutation a callow and downy-faced young officer of Engi- 
neers, going by at the moment, perceiving, appropriates — and to 
which he is most heartily welcome, I am sure. 

Having been torn to pieces (in imagination) by the steam cir- 
cular saws, perpendicular saws, horizontal saws, and saws of eccen- 
tric action, I come to the sauntering part of my expedition, and 
consequently to the core of my Uncommercial pursuits. 

Everywhere, as I saunter up and down the Yard, I meet with 
tokens of its quiet and retiring character. There is a gravity upon 
its red brick offices and houses, a staid pretence of having nothing 
worth mentioning to do, an avoidance of display, which I never 
saw out of England. The white stones of the pavement present 
no other trace of Achilles and his twelve hundred banging men 
(not one of whom strikes an attitude) than a few occasional echoes. 
But for a whisper in the air suggestive of sawdust and shavings, 
the oar-making and the saws of many movements might be miles 
away. Down below here, is the great reservoir of water where 
. timber is steeped in various temperatures, as a part of its season- 
ing process. Above it, on a tramroad supported by pillars, is a 
Chinese Enchanter's Car, which fishes the logs up, when sufficiently 
steeped, and rolls smoothly away with them to stack them. When 
I was a child (the Yard being then familiar to me) I used to think 
that I should like to play at Chinese Enchanter, and to have that 
apparatus placed at my disposal for the purpose by a beneficent 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 231 

country. I still thiuk that I should rather like to try the effect 
of writing a book in it. Its retirement is complete, and to go 
gliding to and fro among the stacks of timber would be a con- 
venient kind of travelling in foreign countries — among the forests 
of North America, the sodden Honduras swamps, the dark pine 
woods, the Norwegian frosts, and the tropical heats, rainy seasons, 
and thunder-storms. The costly store of timber is stacked and 
stowed away in sequestered places, with the pervading avoidance 
of flourish or effect. It makes as little of itself as possible, and 
calls to no one " Come and look at me ! " And yet it is picked 
out from the trees of the world ; picked out for length, picked out 
for breadth, picked out for straightness, picked out for crookedness, 
chosen with an eye to every need of ship and boat. Strangely 
twisted pieces lie about, precious in the sight of shipwrights. 
Sauntering through these groves, I come upon an open glade where 
workmen are examining some timber recently delivered. Quite 
a pastoral scene, with a background of river and windmill! and 
no more like War than the American States are at present like an 
Union. 

Sauntering among the ropemaking, I am spun into a state of 
blissful indolence, wherein my rope of life seems to be so untwisted 
by the process as that I can see back to very early days indeed, 
when my bad dreams — they were frightful, though my more ma- 
ture understanding has never made out why — were of an inter- 
minable sort of ropemaking, with long minute filaments for strands, 
which, when they were spun home together close to my eyes, occa- 
sioned screaming. Next, I walk among the quiet lofts of stores — 
of sails, spars, rigging, ships' boats — determined to believe that 
somebody in authority wears a girdle and bends beneath the weight 
of a massive bunch of keys, and that, when such a thing is wanted, 
he comes telling his keys like Blue Beard, and opens such a door. 
Impassive as the long lofts look, let the electric battery send down 
the word, and the shutters and doors shall fly open, and such a 
fleet of armed ships, under steam and under sail, shall burst forth 
as will charge the old Medway — where the merry Stuart let the 
Dutch come, while his not so merry sailors starved in the streets — 
with something worth looking at to carry to the sea. Thus I idle 
round to the Medway again, where it is now flood tide ; and I find 
the river evincing a strong solicitude to force a way into the dry 
dock where Achilles is waited on by the twelve hundred bangers, 
with intent to bear the whole away before they are ready. 

To the last, the Yard puts a quiet face upon it ; for I make my 
way to the gates through a little quiet grove of trees, shading the 
quaintest of Dutch landing-places, where the leaf-speckled shadow 



232 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

of a shipwright just passing away at the further end might be the 
shadow of Russian Peter himself. So, the doors of the great patent 
safe at last close upon me, and I take boat again : somehow, think- 
ing as the oars dip, of braggart Pistol and his brood, and of the quiet 
monsters of the Yard, with their "We don't particularly want to 
do it ; but if it must be done ! " Scrunch. 



All the Year Round, Vol 10, No. 229, Sept. 12, 1863. 
XXVII. 

IN THE FEENCH-FLEMISH COUNTRY. 

" It is neither a bold nor a diversified country," said I to my- 
self, " this country which is three-quarters Flemish, and a quarter 
French ; yet it has its attractions too. Though great lines of rail- 
way traverse it, the trains leave it behind, and go puffing off to 
Paris and the South, to Belgium and Germany, to the Northern 
Sea-Coast of France, and to England, and merely smoke it a little 
in passing. Then I don't know it, and that is a good reason for 
being here ; and I can't pronounce half the long queer names I see 
inscribed over the shops, and that is another good reason for being 
here, since I surely ought to learn how." In short, I was " here," 
and I wanted an excuse for not going away from here, and I made 
it to my satisfaction, and stayed here. 

What part in my decision was borne by Monsieur P. Salcy, is of 
no moment, though I own to encountering that gentleman's name 
on a red bill on the wall, before I made up my mind. Monsieur 
P. Salcy, " par permission de M. le Maire," had established his 
theatre in the whitewashed Hotel de Ville, on the steps of which 
illustrious edifice I stood. And Monsieur P. Salcy, privileged 
director of such theatre, situate in "the first theatrical arrondisse- 
ment of the department of the North," invited French-Flemish 
mankind to come and partake of the intellectual banquet provided 
by his family of dramatic artists, fifteen subjects in number. " La 
Famille P. Salcy, compos^e d'artistes dramatiques, au nombre de 
15 sujets." 

Neither a bold nor a diversified country, I say again, and withal 
an untidy country, but pleasant enough to ride in, when the paved 
roads over the flats and through the hollows, are not too deep fn 
black mud. A country so sparely inhabited, that I wonder where 
the peasants who till and sow and reap the ground, can possibly 
dwell, and also by what invisible balloons they are conveyed from 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 233 

their distant homes into the fields at sunrise and back again at 
sunset. The occasional few poor cottages and farms in this region, 
surely cannot afford shelter to the numbers necessary to the culti- 
vation, albeit the work is done so very deliberately, that on one 
long harvest day I have seen, in twelve miles, about twice as many 
men and women (all told) reaping and binding. Yet have I seen 
more cattle, more sheep, more pigs, and all in better case, than 
where there is purer French spoken, and also better ricks — round 
swelling peg-top ricks, well thatched : not a shapeless brown heap, 
like the toast of a Giant's toast-and-water, pinned to the earth with 
one of the skewers out of his kitchen. A good custom they have 
about here, likewise, of prolonging the sloping tiled roof of farm or 
cottage, so that it overhangs three or four feet, carrying off the wet, 
and making a good drying place wherein to hang up herbs, or im- 
plements, or what not. A better custom than the popular one of 
keeping the refuse-heap and puddle close before the house door : 
which, although I paint my dwelling never so brightly blue (and 
it cannot be too blue for me, hereabouts), will bring fever inside 
my door. Wonderful poultry of the French-Flemish country, why 
take the trouble to he poultry ? Why not stop short at eggs in 
the rising generation, and die out and have done with it 1 Parents 
of chickens have I seen this day, followed by their wretched young 
families, scratching nothing out of the mud with an air — tottering 
about on legs so scraggy and weak, that the valiant word drum- 
sticks becomes a mockery when applied to them, and the crow of 
the lord and master has been a mere dejected case of croup. Carts 
have I seen, and other agricultural instruments, unwieldy, dislo- 
cated, monstrous. Poplar-trees by the thousand fringe the fields 
and fringe the end of the flat landscape, so that I feel, looking 
straight on before me, as if, when I pass the extremest fringe on 
the low horizon, I shall stumble over into space. Little white- 
washed black holes of chapels, with barred doors and Flemish 
inscriptions, abound at roadside corners, and often they are gar- 
nished with a sheaf of wooden crosses, like children's swords ; or, 
in their default, some hollow old tree with a saint roosting in it, 
is similarly decorated, or a pole with a very diminutive saint en- 
shrined aloft in a sort of sacred pigeon-house. Not that we are 
deficient in such decoration in the town here, for, over at the church 
yonder, outside the building, is a scenic representation of the Cru- 
cifixion, built up with old bricks and stones, and made out with 
painted canvas and wooden figures : the whole surmounting the 
dusty skull of some holy personage (perhaps), shut up behind a 
little ashy iron grate, as if it were originally put there to be cooked, 
and the fire had long gone out. A windmilly country this, though 



234 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

the windmills are so damp and rickety, that they nearly knock 
themselves off their legs at every turn of their sails, and creak in 
loud complaint. A weaving country, too, for in the wayside cot- 
tages the loom goes wearily — rattle and click, rattle and click — 
and, looking in, I see the poor weaving peasant, man or woman, 
bending at the work, while the child, working too, turns a little 
handwheel put upon the ground to suit its height. An uncon- 
scionable monster, the loom in a small dwelling, asserting himself 
ungenerously as the bread-winner, straddling over the children's 
straw beds, cramping the family in space and air, and making him- 
self generally objectionable and tyrannical. He is tributary, too, 
to ugly mills and factories and bleaching-grounds, rising out of the 
sluiced fields in an abrupt bare way, disdaining, like himself, to be 
ornamental or accommodating. Surrounded by these things, here 
I stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, persuaded to remain by 
the P. Salcy Family, fifteen dramatic subjects strong. 

There was a Fair besides. The double persuasion being irre- 
sistible, and my sponge being left behind at the last Hotel, I made 
the tour of the little town to buy another. In the small sunny 
shops ^ — mercers, opticians, and druggist-grocers, with here and 
there an emporium of religious images — the gravest of old specta- 
cled Flemish husbands and wives sat contemplating one another 
across bare counters, while the wasps, who seemed to have taken 
military possession of the town, and to have placed it under wasp- 
martial law, executed warlike manoeuvres in the windows. Other 
shops the wasps had entirely to themselves, and nobody cared and 
nobody came when I beat with a five-franc piece upon the board of 
custom. What I sought was no more to be found than if I had 
sought a nugget of Californian gold : so I went, spongeless, to pass 
the evening with the Family P. Salcy. 

The members of the Family P. Salcy were so fat and so like one 
another — fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, uncles, and aunts — 
that I think the local audience were much confused about the plot 
of the piece under representation, and to the last expected that 
everybody must turn out to be the long-lost relative of everybody 
else. The Theatre was established on the top story of the Hotel 
de Ville, and was approached by a long bare staircase, whereon, in 
an airy situation, one of the P. Salcy Family — a stout gentleman 
imperfectly repressed by a belt — took the money. This occasioned 
the greatest excitement of the evening ; for, no sooner did the cur- 
tain rise on the introductory Vaudeville, and reveal in the person 
of the young lover (singing a very short song with his eyebrows) 
apparently the very same identical stout gentleman imperfectly 
repressed by a belt, than everybody rushed out to the paying-place, 



THE UNCOMMEKCIAL TRAVELLER. 235 

to ascertain whether he could possibly have put on that dress-coat, 
that clear complexion, and those arched black vocal eyebrows, in 
so short a space of time. It then became manifest that this was 
another stout gentleman imperfectly repressed by a belt : to whom, 
before the spectators had recovered their presence of mind, entered 
a third stout gentleman imperfectly repressed by a belt, exactly 
like him. These two " subjects," making with the money-taker 
three of the announced fifteen, fell into conversation touching a 
charming young widow : who, presently appearing, proved to be a 
stout lady altogether irrepressible by any means — quite a parallel 
case to the American Negro — fourth of the fifteen subjects, and 
sister of the fifth who presided over the check-department. In 
good time the whole of the fifteen subjects were dramatically pre- 
sented, and we had the inevitable Ma M^re, Ma M^re ! and also 
the inevitable malediction d'un p^re, and likewise the inevitable 
Marquis, and also the inevitable provincial young man, weak- 
minded but faithful, who followed Julie to Paris, and cried and 
laughed and choked all at once. The story was wrought out with 
the help of a virtuous spinning-wheel in the beginning, a vicious 
set of diamonds in the middle, and a rheumatic blessing (which 
arrived by post) from Ma M^re towards the end ; the whole result- 
ing in a small sword in the body of one of the stout gentlemen 
imperfectly repressed by a belt, fifty thousand francs per annum 
and a decoration to the other stout gentleman imperfectly repressed 
by a belt, and an assurance from everybody to the provincial young 
man that if he were not supremely happy — which he seemed to 
have no reason whatever for being — he ought to be. This afforded 
him a final opportunity of crying and laughing and choking all at 
once, and sent the audience home sentimentally delighted. Audi- 
ence more attentive or better behaved there could, not possibly be, 
though the places of second rank in the Theatre of the Family P. 
Salcy were sixpence each in English money, and the places of first 
rank a shilling. How the fifteen subjects ever got so fat upon it, 
the kind Heavens know. 

What gorgeous china figures of knights and ladies, gilded tiU 
they gleamed again, I might have bought at the Fair for the gar- 
niture of my home, if I had been a French-Flemish peasant, and 
had had the money ! What shining coff'ee-cups and saucers I might 
have won at the turntables, if I had had the luck ! Ravishing 
perfumery also, and sweetmeats, I might have speculated in, or I 
might have fired for prizes at a multitude of little dolls in niches, 
and might have hit the doll of dolls, and won francs and fame. 
Or, being a French-Flemish youth, I might have been drawn in a 
hand-cart by my compeers, to tilt for municipal rewards at the 



236 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

water-quintain; which, unless I sent my lance clean through the 
ring, emptied a full bucket over me ; to fend off which, the com- 
petitors wore grotesque old scarecrow hats. Or, being French- 
Flemish man or woman, boy or girl, I might have circled all night 
on my hobby-horse in a stately cavalcade of hobby-horses four ' 
abreast, interspersed with triumphal cars, going round and round 
and round and round, we the goodly company singing a ceaseless 
chorus to the music of the barrel-organ, drum, and cymbals. On 
the whole, not more monotonous than the Ring in Hyde Park, 
London, and much merrier ; for when do the circling company sing 
chorus, there, to the barrel-organ, when do the ladies embrace their 
horses round the neck with both arms, when do the gentlemen fan 
the ladies with the tails of their gallant steeds? On all these 
revolving delights, and on their own especial lamps and Chinese 
lanterns revolving with them, the thoughtful weaver-face brightens, 
and the Hotel de Ville sheds an illuminated line of gaslight : while 
above it, the Eagle of France, gas-outlined and apparently afflicted 
with the prevailing infirmities that have lighted on the poultry, is 
in a very undecided state of policy, and as a bird moulting. Flags 
flutter all around. Such is the prevailing gaiety that the keeper 
of the prison sits on the stone steps outside the prison-door, to have 
a look at the world that is not locked up ; while that agreeable 
retreat, the wine-shop opposite to the prison in the prison-alley (its 
sign La Tranquillity, because of its charming situation), resounds 
with the voices of the shepherds and shepherdesses who resort 
there this festive night. And it reminds me that only this after- 
noon, I saw a shepherd in trouble, tending this way, over the 
jagged stones of a neighbouring street. A magnificent sight it was, 
to behold him in his blouse, a feeble little jog-trot rustic, swept 
along by the wind of two immense gendarmes, in cocked-hats for 
which the street was hardly wide enough, each carrying a bundle of 
stolen property that would not have held his shoulder-knot, and 
clanking a sabre that dwarfed the prisoner. 

"Messieurs et Mesdames, I present to you at this Fair, as a 
mark of my confidence in the people of this so-renowned town, and 
as an act of homage to their good sense and fine taste, the Ventrilo- 
quist, the Ventriloquist ! Further, Messieurs et Mesdames, I pre- 
sent to you the Face-Maker, the Physiognomist, the great Changer 
of Countenances, who transforms the features that Heaven has 
bestowed upon him into an endless succession of surprising and 
extraordinary visages, comprehending, Messieurs et Mesdames, all 
the contortions, energetic and expressive, of which the human face is 
capable, and all the passions of the human heart, as Love, Jealousy, 
Revenge, Hatred, Avarice, Despair ! Hi hi, Ho ho, Lu lu, Come 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 237 

in ! " To this effect, with an occasional smite upon a sonorous kind 
of tambourine — bestowed with a will, as if it represented the 
people who won't come in — holds forth a man of lofty and severe 
demeanour ; a man in stately uniform, gloomy with the knowledge 
he possesses of the inner secrets of the booth. " Come in, come in ! 
Your opportunity presents itself to-night ; to-morrow it will be gone 
for ever. To-morrow morning by the Express Train the railroad 
will reclaim the Ventriloquist and the Face-Maker ! Algeria will 
reclaim the Ventriloquist and the Face-Maker ! Yes ! For the 
honour of their country they have accepted propositions of a magni- 
tude incredible, to appear in Algeria. See them for the last time 
before their departure ! We go to commence on the instant. Hi hi ! 
Ho ho ! Lu lu ! Come in ! Take the money that now ascends, 
Madame ; but after that, no more, for we commence ! Come in ! " 
Nevertheless, the eyes both of the gloomy Speaker and of Madame 
receiving sous in a muslin bower, survey the crowd pretty sharply 
after the ascending money has ascended, to detect any lingering 
sous at the turning-point. " Come in, come in ! Is there any more 
money, Madame, on the point of ascending ? If so, we wait for it. 
If not, we commence ! " The orator looks back over his shoulder 
to say it, lashing the spectators with the conviction that he beholds 
through the folds of the drapery into which he is about to plunge, 
the Ventriloquist and the Face-Maker. Several sous burst out of 
pockets, and ascend. " Come up, then. Messieurs ! " exclaims 
Madame in a shrill voice, and beckoning with a bejewelled finger. 
" Come up ! This presses. Monsieur has commanded that they 
commence ! " Monsieur dives into his Interior, and the last half- 
dozen of us follow. His Interior is comparatively severe; his Ex- 
terior also. A true Temple of Art needs nothing but seats, drapery, 
a small table with two moderator lamps hanging over it, and an 
ornamental looking-glass let into the wall. Monsieur in uniform 
gets behind the table and surveys us with disdain, his forehead be- 
coming diabolically intellectual under the moderators. " Messieurs 
et Mesdames, I present to you the Ventriloquist. He will com- 
mence with the celebrated Experience of the bee in the window. 
The bee, apparently the veritable bee of Nature, will hover in the 
window, and about the room. He wiU be with difficulty caught in 
the hand of Monsieur the Ventriloquist — he will escape — he will 
again hover — at length he will be recaptured by Monsieur the Ven- 
triloquist, and will be with difficulty put into a bottle. Achieve 
then, Monsieur ! " Here the proprietor is replaced behind the table 
by the Ventriloquist, who is thin and sallow, and of a weakly aspect. 
While the bee is in progress, Monsieur the Proprietor sits apart on 
a stool, immersed in dark and remote thought. The moment the 



238 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

bee is bottled, he stalks forward, eyes us gloomily as we applaud, 
and then announces, sternly waving his hand : " The magnificent 
Experience of the child with the whooping-cough ! " The child dis- 
posed of, he starts up as before. " The superb and extraordinary 
Experience of the dialogue between Monsieur Tatambour in his din- 
ing-room, and his domestic, Jerome, in the cellar ; concluding with 
the songsters of the grove, and the Concert of domestic Farm-yard 
animals." All this done, and well done, Monsieur the Ventriloquist 
withdraws, and Monsieur the Face-Maker bursts in, as if his retir- 
ing-room were a mile long instead of a yard. A corpulent little 
man in a large white waistcoat, with a comic countenance, and with 
a wig in his hand. Irreverent disposition to laugh, instantly checked 
by the tremendous gravity of the Face-Maker, who intimates in his 
bow that if we expect that sort of thing we are mistaken. A very 
little shaving-glass with a leg behind it is handed in, and placed on 
the table before the Face-Maker. " Messieurs et Mesdames, with 
no other assistance than this mirror and this wig, I shall have the 
honour of showing you a thousand characters." As a preparation, 
the Face-Maker with both hands gouges himself, and turns his 
mouth inside out. He then becomes frightfully grave again, and 
says to the Proprietor, "I am ready!" Proprietor stalks forth 
from baleful reverie, and announces " The Young Conscript ! " 
Face-Maker claps his wig on, hind side before, looks in the glass, 
and appears above it as a conscript so very imbecile, and squinting 
so extremely hard, that I should think the State would never get 
any good of him. Thunders of applause. Face-Maker dips behind 
the looking-glass, brings his own hair forward, is himself again, is 
awfully grave. " A distinguished inhabitant of the Faubourg St. 
Germain." Face-Maker dips, rises, is supposed to be aged, blear- 
eyed, toothless, slightly palsied, supernaturally polite, evidently of 
noble birth. " The oldest member of the Corps of Invalides on 
the fete-day of his master." Face-Maker dips, rises, wears the wig 
on one side, has become the feeblest military bore in existence, and 
(it is clear) would lie frightfully about his past achievements, if he 
were not confined to pantomime. " The Miser ! " Face-Maker dips, 
rises, clutches a bag, and every hair of the wig is on end to express 
that he lives in continual dread of thieves. " The Genius of France ! " 
Face-Maker dips, rises, wig pushed back and smoothed flat, little 
cocked-hat (artfully concealed till now) put a-top of it, Face-Maker's 
white waistcoat much advanced, Face-Maker's left hand in bosom 
of white waistcoat, Face-Maker's right hand behind his back. 
Thunders. This is the first of three positions of the Genius of 
France. In the second position, the Face-Maker takes snuff; in 
the third, rolls up his right hand, and surveys illimitable armies 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 239 

through that pocket-glass. The Face-Maker then, by putting out 
his tongue, and wearing the wig nohow in particular, becomes the 
Village Idiot. The most remarkable feature in the whole of his 
ingenious performance, is, that whatever he does to disguise him- 
self, has the effect of rendering him rather more like himself than 
he was at first. 

There were peep-shows in this Fair, and I had the pleasure of 
recognising several fields of glory with which I became well ac- 
quainted a year or two ago as Crimean battles, now doing duty as 
Mexican victories. The change was neatly effected by some extra 
smoking of the Russians, and by permitting the camp followers free 
range in the foreground to despoil the enemy of their uniforms. As 
no British troops had ever happened to be within sight when the 
artist took his original sketches, it followed fortunately that none 
were in the way now. 

The Fair wound up with a ball. Respecting the particular night 
of the week on which the ball took place, I decline to commit my- 
self; merely mentioning that it was held in a stable-yard so very 
close to the railway, that it is a mercy the locomotive did not set 
fire to it. (In Scotland, I suppose it would have done so.) There, 
in a tent prettily decorated with looking-glasses and a myriad of 
toy flags, the people danced all night. It was not an expensive 
recreation, the price of a double ticket for a cavalier and lady being 
one and threepence in English money, and even of that small sum 
fivepence was reclaimable for " consommation ; " which word I vent- 
ure to translate into refreshments of no greater strength, at the 
strongest, than ordinary wine made hot, with sugar and lemon in 
it. It was a ball of great good humour and of great enjoyment, 
though very many of the dancers must have been as poor as the 
fifteen subjects of the P. Salcy Family. 

In short, not having taken my own pet national pint pot with 
me to this Fair, I was very well satisfied with the measure of 
simple enjoyment that it poured into the dull French-Flemish 
country life. How dull that is, I had an opportunity of consider- 
ing when the Fair was over — when the tri-coloured flags were 
withdrawn from the windows of the houses on the Place where 
the Fair was held — when the windows were close shut, apparently 
until next Fair-time — when the Hotel de Ville had cut off its 
gas and put away its eagle — when the two paviours, whom I 
take to form the entire paving population of the town, were ram- 
ming down the stones which had been pulled up for the erection 
of decorative poles — when the jailer had slammed his gate, and 
sulkily locked himself in with his charges. But then, as I paced 
the ring which marked the track of the departed hobby-horses on 



240 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

the market-place, pondering in my mind how long some hobby- 
horses do leave their tracks in public ways, and how difficult they 
are to erase, my eyes were greeted with a goodly sight. I beheld 
four male personages thoughtfully pacing the Place together, in the 
sunlight, evidently not belonging to the town, and having upon 
them a certain loose cosmopolitan air of not belonging to any town. 
One was clad in a suit of white canvas, another in a cap and blouse, 
the third in an old military frock, the fourth in a shapeless dress 
that looked as if it had been made out of old umbrellas. All wore 
dust-coloured shoes. My heart beat high; for, in those four male 
personages, although complexionless and eyebrowless, I beheld four 
subjects of the Family P. Salcy. Blue-bearded though they were, 
and bereft of the youthful smoothness of cheek which is imparted 
by what is termed in Albion a " White-chapel shave " (and which 
is, in fact, whitening, judiciously applied to the jaws with the palm 
of the hand), I recognised them. As I stood admiring, there 
emerged from the yard of a lowly Cabaret, the excellent Ma M^re, 
Ma M^re, with the words, " The soup is served ; " words which so 
elated the subject in the canvas suit, that when they all ran in 
to partake, he went last, dancing with his hands stuck angularly 
into the pockets of his canvas trousers, after the Pierrot manner. 
Glancing down the Yard, the last I saw of him was, that he 
looked in through a window (at the soup, no doubt) on one leg. 

Full of this pleasure, I shortly afterwards departed from the 
town, little dreaming of an addition to my good fortune. But 
more was in reserve. I went by a train which was heavy with 
third-class carriages, full of young fellows (well guarded) who had 
drawn unlucky numbers in the last conscription, and were on their 
way to a famous French garrison town where much of the raw 
military material is worked up into soldiery. At the station they 
had been sitting about, in their threadbare homespun blue garments, 
with their poor little bundles under their arms, covered with dust 
and clay, and the various soils of France ; sad enough at heart, 
most of them, but putting a good face upon it, and slapping their 
breasts and singing choruses on the smallest provocation ; the 
gayer spirits shouldering half loaves of black bread speared upon their 
walking-sticks. As we went along, they were audible at every 
station, chorusing wildly out of tune, and feigning the highest 
hilarity. After a while, however, they began to leave off singing, 
and to laugh naturally, while at intervals there mingled with their 
laughter the barking of a dog. Now, I had to alight short of their 
destination, and, as that stoppage of the train was attended with a 
quantity of horn blowing, bell ringing, and proclamation of what 
Messieurs les Voyageurs were to do, and were not to do, in order 



THE UNCOMiMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 241 

to reach their respective destinations, I had ample leisure to go for- 
ward on the platform to take a parting look at my recruits, whose 
heads were all out at window, and who were laughing like delighted 
children. Then I perceived that a large poodle with a pink nose, 
who had been their travelling companion and the cause of their 
mirth, stood on his hind-legs presenting arms on the extreme verge 
of the platform, ready to salute them as the train went off. This 
poodle wore a military shako (it is unnecessary to add, very much 
on one side over one eye), a little military coat, and the regulation 
white gaiters. He was armed with a little musket and a little 
sword-bayonet, and he stood presenting arms in perfect attitude, 
with his unobscured eye on his master or superior officer, who stood 
by him. So admirable was his discipline, that, when the train 
moved, and he was greeted with the parting cheers of the recruits, 
and also with a shower of centimes, several of which struck his 
shako, and had a tendency to discompose him, he remained staunch 
on his post, until the train was gone. He then resigned his arms 
to his officer, took off his shako by rubbing his paw over it, dropped 
on four legs, bringing his uniform coat into the absurdest relations 
with the overarching skies, and ran about the platform in his white 
gaiters, wagging his tail to an exceeding great extent. It struck 
me that there was more waggery than this in the poodle, and that 
he knew that the recruits would neither get through their exercises, 
nor get rid of their uniforms, as easily as he ; revolving which in 
my thoughts, and seeking in my pockets some small money to 
bestow upon him, I casually directed my eyes to the face of his 
superior officer, and in him beheld the Face-Maker ! Though it 
was not the way to Algeria, but quite the reverse, the military 
poodle's Colonel was the Face-Maker in a dark blouse, with a small 
bundle dangling over his shoulder at the end of an umbrella, and 
taking a pipe from his breast to smoke as he and the poodle went 
their mysterious way. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 10, No. 231, Sept. 26, 1863. 
XXVIII. 

MEDICINE MEN OF CIVILISATION. 

My voyages (in paper boats) among savages often yield me 
matter for reflection at home. It is curious to trace the savage 
in the civilised man, and to detect the hold of some savage cus- 
toms on conditions of society rather boastful of being high above 
them. 



242 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

I wonder, is the Medicine Man of the North American Indians 
never to be got rid of, out of the North American country ? He 
comes into my Wigwam on all manner of occasions, and with the 
absurdest "Medicine." I always find it extremely difficult, and I 
often find it simply impossible, to keep him out of my Wigwam. 
For his legal "Medicine" he sticks upon his head the hair of 
quadrupeds, and plasters the same with fat, and dirty white pow- 
der, and talks a gibberish quite unknown to the men and squaws 
of his tribe. For his religious " Medicine " he puts on puffy white 
sleeves, little black aprons, large black waistcoats of a peculiar 
cut, coUarless coats with Medicine button-holes, Medicine stockings 
and gaiters and shoes, and tops the whole with a highly grotesque 
Medicinal hat. In one respect, to be sure, I am quite free from 
him. On occasions when the Medicine Men in general, together 
with a large number of the miscellaneous inhabitants of his village, 
both male and female, are presented to the principal Chief, his 
native "Medicine" is a comical mixture of old odds and ends 
(hired of traders) and new things in antiquated shapes, and pieces 
of red cloth (of which he is particularly fond), and white and red 
and blue paint for the face. The irrationality of this particular 
Medicine culminates in a mock battle-rush, from which many of 
the squaws are borne out, much dilapidated. I need not observe 
how unlike this is to a Drawing Room at St. James's Palace. 

The African magician I find it very difficult to exclude from my 
Wigwam too. This creature takes cases of death and mourning 
under his supervision, and will frequently impoverish a whole 
family by his preposterous enchantments. He is a great eater 
and drinker, and always conceals a rejoicing stomach under a 
grieving exterior. His charms consist of an infinite quantity of 
worthless scraps, for which he charges very high. He impresses 
on the poor bereaved natives, that the more of his followers they 
pay to exhibit such scraps on their persons for an hour or two 
(though they never saw the deceased in their lives, and are put in 
high spirits by his decease), the more honourably and piously they 
grieve for the dead. The poor people, submitting themselves to 
this conjuror, an expensive procession is formed, in which bits of 
stick, feathers of birds, and a quantity of other unmeaning objects 
besmeared with black paint, are carried in a certain ghastly order 
of which no one understands the meaning, if it ever had any, to 
the brink of the grave, and are then brought back again. 

. In the Tonga Islands everything is supposed to have a soul, so 
that when a hatchet is irreparably broken, they say, " His immor- 
tal part has departed ; he is gone to the happy hunting-plains." 
This belief leads to the logical sequence that when a man is buried, 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 243 

some of his eating and drinking vessels, and some of his warlike 
implements, must be broken and buried with him. Superstitious 
and wrong, but surely a more respectable superstition than the 
hire of antic scraps for a show that has no meaning based on any- 
sincere belief. 

Let me halt on my Uncommercial road, to throw a passing glance 
on some funeral solemnities that I have seen where North American 
Indians, African Magicians, and Tonga Islanders, are supposed not 
to be. 

Once, I dwelt in an Italian city, where there dwelt with me for 
a while, an Englishman of an amiable nature, great enthusiasm, 
and no discretion. This friend discovered a desolate stranger, 
mourning over the unexpected death of one very dear to him, in a 
solitary cottage among the vineyards of an outlying village. The 
circumstances of the bereavement were unusually distressing ; and 
the survivor, new to the peasants and the country, sorely needed 
help, being alone with the remains. With some difficulty, but 
with the strong influence of a purpose at once gentle, disinterested, 
and determined, my friend — Mr. Kindheart — obtained access to 
the mourner, and undertook to arrange the burial. 

There was a small Protestant cemetery near the city walls, and 
as Mr. Kindheart came back to me, he turned into it and chose 
the spot. He was always highly flushed when rendering a service 
unaided, and I knew that to make him happy I must keep aloof 
from his ministration. But when at dinner he warmed with the 
good action of the day, and conceived the brilliant idea of comfort- 
ing the mourner with "an English funeral," I ventured to intimate 
that I thought that institution, which was not absolutely sublime 
at home, might prove a failure in Italian hands. However, Mr. 
Kindheart was so enraptured with his conception, that he presently 
wrote down into the town requesting the attendance with to-mor- 
row's earliest light of a certain little upholsterer. This upholsterer 
was famous for speaking the unintelligible local dialect (his own) 
in a far more unintelligible manner than any other man alive. 

When from my bath next morning I overheard Mr. Kindheart 
and the upholsterer in conference on the top of an echoing stair- 
case ; and when I overheard Mr. Kindheart rendering English 
Undertaking phrases into very choice Italian, and the upholsterer 
replying in the unknown Tongues; and when I furthermore re- 
membered that the local funerals had no resemblance to English 
funerals ; I became in my secret bosom apprehensive. But Mr. 
Kindheart informed me at breakfast that measures had been taken 
to ensure a signal success. 

As the funeral was to take place at sunset, and as I knew to 



244 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

which of the city gates it must tend, I went out at that gate as 
the sun descended, and walked along the dusty, dusty road. I 
had not walked far, when I encountered this procession : 

1. Mr. Kindheart, much abashed, on an immense grey horse. 

2. A bright yellow coach and pair, driven by a coachman in 
bright red velvet knee-breeches and waistcoat. (This was the 
established local idea of State.) Both coach doors kept open by 
the coffin, which was on its side within, and sticking out at each. 

3. Behind the coach, the mourner, for whom the coach was 
intended, walking in the dust. 

4. Concealed behind a roadside well for the irrigation of a 
garden, the unintelligible Upholsterer, admiring. 

It matters little now. Coaches of all colours are alike to poor 
Kindheart, and he rests far North of the little cemetery with the 
cypress-trees, by the city walls where the Mediterranean is so 
beautiful. 

My first funeral, a fair representative funeral after its kind, was 
that of the husband of a married servant, once my nurse. She 
married for money. Sally Flanders, after a year or two of matri- 
mony, became the relict of Flanders, a small master builder ; and 
either she or Flanders had done me the honour to express a desire 
that I should "follow." I may have been seven or eight years 
old; — young enough, certainly, to feel rather alarmed by the 
expression, as not knowing where the invitation was held to termi- 
nate, and how far I was expected to follow the deceased Flanders. 
Consent being given by the heads of houses, I was jobbed up into 
what was pronounced at home decent mourning (comprehending 
somebody else's shirt, unless my memory deceives me), and was 
admonished that if, when the funeral was in action, I put my 
hands in my pockets, or took my eyes out of my pocket-handker- 
chief, I was personally lost, and my family disgraced. On the 
eventful day, having tried to get myself into a disastrous frame of 
mind, and having formed a very poor opinion of myself because I 
couldn't cry, I repaired to Sally's. Sally was an excellent creature, 
and had been a good wife to old Flanders, but the moment I saw 
her I knew that she was not in her own real natural state. She 
formed a sort of Coat of Arms, grouped with a smelling-bottle, a 
handkerchief, an orange, a bottle of vinegar, Flanders's sister, her 
own sister, Flanders's brother's wife, and two neighbouring gossips 
— all in mourning, and all ready to hold her whenever she fainted. 
At sight of poor little me she became much agitated (agitating 
me much more), and having exclaimed, " here's dear Master 
Uncommercial ! " became hysterical, and swooned as if I had been 
the death of her. An affecting scene followed, during which I 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 245 

was handed about and poked at her by various people, as if I were 
the bottle of salts. Reviving a little, she embraced me, said, " You 
knew him well, dear Master Uncommercial, and he knew you ! " and 
fainted again : which, as the rest of the Coat of Arms soothingly 
said, "done her credit." Now, I knew that she needn't have 
fainted unless she liked, and that she wouldn't have fainted unless 
it had been expected of her, quite as well as I know it at this 
day. It made me feel uncomfortable and hypocritical besides. I 
was not sure but that it might be manners in me to faint next, 
and I resolved to keep my eye on Flanders's uncle, and if I saw 
any signs of his going in that direction, to go too, politely. But 
Flanders's uncle (who was a weak little old retail grocer) had only 
one idea, which was that we all wanted tea; and he handed us 
cups of tea all round, incessantly, whether we refused or not. 
There was a young nephew of Flanders's present, to whom Flan- 
ders, it was rumoured, had left nineteen guineas. He drank all 
the tea that was offered him, this nephew — amounting, I should 
say, to several quarts — and ate as much plum-cake as he could 
possibly come by; but he felt it to be decent mourning that he 
should now and then stop in the midst of a lump of cake, and 
appear to forget that his mouth was full, in the contemplation of 
his uncle's memory. I felt all this to be the fault of the under- 
taker, who was handing us gloves on a tea-tray as if they were 
muffins, and tying us into cloaks (mine had to be pinned up all 
round, it was so long for me), because I knew that he was making 
game. So, when we got out into the streets, and I constantly dis- 
arranged the procession by tumbling on the people before me because 
my handkerchief blinded my eyes, and tripping up the people behind 
me because my cloak was so long, I felt that we were all making 
game. I was truly sorry for Flanders, but I knew that it was no 
reason why we should be trying (the women with their heads in 
hoods like coal-scuttles with the black side outward) to keep step 
with a man in a scarf, carrying a thing like a mourning spy-glass, 
which he was going to open presently and sweep the horizon with. 
I knew that we should not all have been speaking in one particular 
key-note struck by the undertaker, if we had not been making 
game. Even in our faces we were every one of us as like the 
undertaker as if we had been his own family, and I perceived that 
this could not have happened unless w^e had been making game. 
When we returned to Sally's, it was all of a piece. The con- 
tinued impossibility of getting on without plum-cake; the cere- 
monious apparition of a pair of decanters containing port and 
sherry and cork ; Sally's sister at the tea-table, clinking the best 
crockery and shaking her head mournfully every time she looked 



246 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

down into the teapot, as if it were the tomb ; the Coat of Arms 
again, and Sally as before; lastly, the words of consolation ad- 
ministered to Sally when it was considered right that she should 
" come round nicely : " which were, that the deceased had had " as 
com-for-ta-ble a fu-ne-ral as comfortable could be ! " 

Other funerals have I seen with grown-up eyes, since that day, 
of which the burden has been the same childish burden. Making 
game. Real affliction, real grief and solemnity, have been outraged, 
and the funeral has been "performed." The waste for which the 
funeral customs of many tribes of savages are conspicuous, has 
attended these civilised obsequies; and once, and twice, have I 
wished in my soul that if the waste must be, they would let the 
undertaker bury the money, and let me bury the friend. 

In France, upon the whole, these ceremonies are more sensibly 
regulated, because they are upon the whole less expensively regu- 
lated. I cannot say that I have ever been much edified by the 
custom of tying a bib and apron on the front of the house of 
mourning, or that I would myself particularly care to be driven 
to my grave in a nodding and bobbing car, like an infirm four-post 
bedstead, by an inky fellow-creature in a cocked-hat. But it may 
be that I am constitutionally insensible to the virtues of a cocked- 
hat. In provincial France, the solemnities are sufiiciently hideous, 
but are few and cheap. The friends and townsmen of the departed, 
in their own dresses and not masquerading under the auspices of 
the African Conjuror, surround the hand-bier, and often carry it. 
It is not considered indispensable to stifle the bearers, or even to 
elevate the burden on their shoulders; consequently it is easily 
taken up, and easily set down, and is carried through the streets 
without the distressing floundering and shuffling that we see at 
home. A dirty priest or two, and a dirtier acolyte or two, do not 
lend any especial grace to the proceedings ; and I regard with per- 
sonal animosity the bassoon, which is blown at intervals by the big 
legged priest (it is always a big legged priest who blows the bas- 
soon), when his fellows combine in a lugubrious stalwart drawl. 
But there is far less of the Conjuror and the Medicine Man in the 
business than under like circumstances here. The grim coaches 
that we reserve expressly for such shows, are non-existent ; if the 
cemetery be far out of the town, the coaches that are hired for 
other purposes of life are hired for this purpose ; and although the 
honest vehicles make no pretence of being overcome, I have never 
noticed that the people in them were the worse for it. In Italy, 
the hooded Members of Confraternities who attend on funerals, are 
dismal and ugly to look upon ; but the services they render are at 
least voluntarily rendered, and impoverish no one, and cost nothing. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 247 

Why should high civilisation and low savagery ever come together 
on the point of making them a wantonly wasteful and contemptible 
set of forms ? 

Once I lost a friend by death, who had been troubled in his time 
by the Medicine Man and the Conjuror, and upon whose limited 
resources there were abundant claims. The Conjuror assured me 
that I must positively "follow," and both he and the Medicine 
Man entertained no doubt that I must go in a black carriage, and 
must wear "fittings." I objected to fittings as having nothing to 
do with my friendship, and I objected to the black carriage as 
being in more senses than one a job. So, it came into my mind to 
try what would happen if I quietly walked, in my own way, from 
my own house to my friend's burial-place, and stood beside his open 
grave in my own dress and person, reverently listening to the best 
of Services. It satisfied my mind, I found, quite as well as if I 
had been disguised in a hired hatband and scarf both trailing to 
my very heels, and as if I had cost the orphan children, in their 
greatest need, ten guineas. 

Can any one who ever^ beheld the stupendous absurdities atten- 
dant on " A message from the Lords " in the House of Commons, 
turn upon the Medicine Man of the poor Indians ? Has he any 
" Medicine " in that dried skin pouch of his, so supremely ludicrous 
as the two Masters in Chancery holding up their black petticoats 
and butting their ridiculous wigs at Mr. Speaker 1 Yet there are 
authorities innumerable to tell me — as there are authorities innu- 
merable among the Indians to tell them — that the nonsense is 
indispensable, and that its abrogation would involve most awful 
consequences. What would any rational creature who had never 
heard of judicial and forensic "fittings," think of the Court of Com- 
mon Pleas on the first day of Term ? Or with what an awakened 
sense of humour would LiviNGSTOisrE's account of a similar scene be 
perused, if the fur and red cloth and goats' hair and horse hair and 
powered chalk and black patches on the top of the head, were all 
at Tala Mungongo instead of Westminster ? That model mission- 
ary and good brave man found at least one tribe of blacks with a 
very strong sense of the ridiculous, insomuch that although an 
amiable and docile people, they never could see the Missionaries dis- 
pose of their legs in the attitude of kneeling, or hear them begin a 
hymn in chorus, without bursting into roars of irrepressible laugh- 
ter. It is much to be hoped that no member of this facetious tribe 
may ever find his way to England and get committed for contempt 
of Court. 

In the Tonga Island already mentioned, there are a set of per- 
sonages called Mataboos — or some such name — -who are the 



248 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

masters of all the public ceremonies, and who know the exact 
place in which every chief must sit down when a solemn public 
meeting takes place : a meeting which bears a family resemblance 
to our own Public Dinner, in respect of its being a main part of 
the proceedings that every gentleman present is required to drink 
something nasty. These Mataboos are a privileged order, so im- 
portant is their avocation, and they make the most of their high 
functions. A long way out of the Tonga Islands, indeed, rather 
near the British Islands, was there no calling in of the Mataboos 
the other day to settle an earth-convulsing question of precedence ; 
and was there no weighty opinion delivered on the part of the 
Mataboos which, being interpreted to that unlucky tribe of blacks 
with the sense of the ridiculous, would infallibly set the whole 
population screaming with laughter ? 

My sense of justice demands the admission, however, that this 
is not quite a one-sided question. If we submit ourselves meekly 
to the Medicine Man and the Conjuror, and are not exalted by it, 
the savages may retort upon us that we act more unwisely than 
they in other matters wherein we fail to imitate them. It is a 
widely diffused custom among savage tribes, when they meet to 
discuss any affair of public importance, to sit up all night making 
a horrible noise, dancing, blowing shells, and (in cases where they 
are familiar with fire-arms) flying out into open places and letting 
off guns. It is questionable whether our legislative assemblies 
might not take a hint from this. A shell is not a melodious wind- 
instrument, and it is monotonous ; but it is as musical as, and not 
more monotonous than, my Honourable friend's own trumpet, or 
the trumpet that he blows so hard for the Minister. The useless- 
ness of arguing with any supporter of a Government or of an 
Opposition, is well known. Try dancing. It is a better exercise, 
and has the unspeakable recommendation that it couldn't be re- 
ported. The honourable and savage member who has a loaded 
gun, and has grown impatient of debate, plunges out of doors, fires 
in the air, and returns calm and silent to the Palaver. Let the 
honourable and civilised member similarly charged with a speech, 
dart into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey in the silence of night, 
let his speech off, and come back harmless. It is not at first sight 
a very rational custom to paint a broad blue stripe across one's nose 
and both cheeks, and a broad red stripe from the forehead to the 
chin, to attach a few pounds of wood to one's under lip, to stick 
fish-bones in one's ears and a brass curtain-ring in one's nose, and 
to rub one's body all over with rancid oil, as a preliminary to enter- 
ing on business. But this is a question of taste and ceremony, and 
so is the Windsor Uniform. The manner of entering on the busi- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 249 

ness itself is another question. A council of six hundred savage 
gentlemen entirely independent of tailors, sitting on their hams in 
a ring, smoking, and occasionally grunting, seem to me, according 
to the experience I have gathered in my voyages and travels, some- 
how to do what they come together for ; whereas that is not at all 
the general experience of a council of six hundred civilised gentle- 
men very dependent on tailors and sitting on mechanical contriv- 
ances. It is better that an Assembly should do its utmost to 
envelop itself in smoke, than that it should direct its endeavours 
to enveloping the public in smoke ; and I would rather it buried 
half a hundred hatchets than buried one subject demanding at- 
tention. 



All the Year Round, Vol. 10, No. 235, Oct. 24, 1863. 

XXIX. 

titbull's alms-houses. 

By the side of most railways out of London, one may see Aims- 
Houses and Retreats (generally with a Wing or a Centre wanting, 
and ambitious of being much bigger than they are), some of which 
are newly-founded Institutions, and some old establishments trans- 
planted. There is a tendency in these pieces of architecture to 
shoot upward unexpectedly, like Jack's bean-stalk, and to be ornate 
in spires of Chapels and lanterns of Halls, which might lead to 
the embellishment of the air with many castles of questionable 
beauty but for the restraining consideration of expense. However, 
the managers, being always of a sanguine temperament, comfort 
themselves with plans and elevations of Loomings in the future, 
and are influenced in the present by philanthropy towards the rail- 
way passengers. For, the question how prosperous and promising 
the buildings can be made to look in their eyes, usually supersedes 
the lesser question how they can be turned to the best account 
for the inmates. 

Why none of the people who reside in these places ever look out 
of window, or take an airing in the piece of ground which is going 
to be a garden by-and-bye, is one of the wonders I have added to my 
always-lengthening list of the wonders of the world. I have got it 
into my mind that they live in a state of chronic injury and resent- 
ment, and on that account refuse to decorate the building with a 
human interest. As I have known legatees deeply injured by a 
bequest of five hundred pounds because it was not five thousand, 
and as I was once acquainted with a pensioner on the Public to the 



250 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

extent of two hundred a year, who perpetually anathematised his 
Country because he was not in the receipt of four, having no claim 
whatever to sixpence : so perhaps it usually happens, within cer- 
tain limits, that to get a little help is to get a notion of being de- 
frauded of more. " How do they pass their lives in this beautiful 
and peaceful place ! " was the subject of my speculation with a visitor 
who once accompanied me to a charming rustic retreat for old men 
and women: a quaint ancient foundation in a pleasant English 
county, behind a picturesque church and among rich old convent 
gardens. There were but some dozen or so of houses, and we 
agreed that we would talk with the inhabitants, as they sat in their 
groined rooms between the light of their fires and the light shining 
in at their latticed windows, and would find out. They passed their 
lives in considering themselves mulcted of certain ounces of tea by 
a deaf old steward who lived among them in the quadrangle. There 
was no reason to suppose that any such ounces of tea had ever been 
in existence, or that the old steward so much as knew what was the 
matter; — he passed his life in considering himself periodically 
defrauded of a birch-broom by the beadle. 

But it is neither to old Aims-Houses in the country, nor to new 
Aims-Houses by the railroad, that these present Uncommercial 
notes relate. They refer back to journeys made among those 
common-place smoky-fronted London Aims-Houses, with a little 
paved court-yard in front enclosed by iron railings, which have got 
snowed up, as it were, by bricks and mortar ; which were once in 
a suburb, but are now in the densely populated town ; gaps in the 
busy life around them, parentheses in the close and blotted texts 
of the streets. 

Sometimes, these Aims-Houses belong to a Company or Society. 
Sometimes, they were established by individuals, and are main- 
tained out of private funds bequeathed in perpetuity long ago. 
My favourite among them is Titbull's, which establishment is a 
picture of many. Of TitbuU I know no more than that he de- 
ceased in 1723, that his Christian name w^as Sampson, and his 
social designation Esquire, and that he founded these Aims-Houses 
as Dwellings for Nine Poor Women and Six Poor Men by his Will 
and Testament. I should not know even this much, but for its 
being inscribed on a grim stone very difficult to read, let into the 
front of the centre house of Titbull's Aims-Houses, and which stone 
is ornamented a-top with a piece of sculptured drapery resembling 
the effigy of Titbull's bath-towel. 

Titbull's Aims-Houses are in the east of London, in a great high- 
way, in a poor busy and thronged neighbourhood. Old iron and 
fried fish, cough drops and artificial flowers, boiled pigs'-feet and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 251 

household furniture that looks as if it were polished up with lip- 
salve, umbrellas full of vocal literature and saucers full of shell-fish 
in a green juice which I hope is natural to them when their health 
is good, garnish the paved sideways as you go to Titbull's. I 
take the ground to have risen in those parts since Titbull's time, 
and you drop into his domain by three stone steps. So did I 
first drop into it, very nearly striking my brows against Tit- 
bull's pump, which stands with its back to the thoroughfare just 
inside the gate, and has a conceited air of reviewing Titbull's 
pensioners. 

" And a worse one," said a virulent old man with a pitcher, 
" there isn't nowhere. A harder one to work, nor a grudginer one 
to yield, there isn't nowhere ! " This old man wore a long coat, 
such as we see Hogarth's Chairmen represented with, and it was 
of that peculiar green-pea hue without the green, which seems to 
come of poverty. It had also that peculiar smell of cupboard 
which seems to come of poverty. 

" The pump is rusty, perhaps," said I. 

" Not ^^," said the old man, regarding it with undiluted virulence 
in his watery eye. "It never were fit to be termed a pump. 
That's what's the matter with it^ 

"Whose fault is that?" said I. 

The old man, who had a working mouth which seemed to be 
trying to masticate his anger and to find that it was too hard and 
there was too much of it, repHed, " Them gentlemen." 

" What gentlemen ? " 

" Maybe you're one of 'em ? " said the old man, suspiciously. 

" The trustees 1 " 

"I wouldn't trust 'em myself," said the virulent old man. 

" If you mean the gentlemen who administer this place, no, I am 
not one of them ; nor have I ever so much as heard of them." 

"I wish / never heard of them," gasped the old man : "at my 
time of life — with the rheumatics — drawing water — from that 
thing ! " Not to be deluded into calling it a Pump, the old man 
gave it another virulent look, took up his pitcher, and carried it 
into a corner dwelling-house, shutting the door after him. 

Looking around and seeing that each little house was a house of 
two little rooms ; and seeing that the little oblong court-yard in 
front was like a graveyard for the inhabitants, saving that no word 
was engraven on its flat dry stones ; and seeing that the currents 
of life and noise ran to and fro outside, having no more to do with 
the place than if it were a sort of low-water mark on a lively 
beach ; I say, seeing this and nothing else, I was going out at the 
gate when one of the doors opened. 



252 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

" Was you looking for anything, sir ? " asked a tidy well-favoured 
woman. 

Really, no ; I couldn't say I was. 

" Not wanting any one, sir ? " 

" No — at least I — pray what is the name of the elderly gentle- 
man who lives in the corner there ? " 

The tidy woman stepped out to be sure of the door I indicated, 
and she and the pump and I stood all three in a row with our 
backs to the thoroughfare. 

"Oh ! His name is Mr. Battens," said the tidy woman, drop- 
ping her voice. 

" I have just been talking with him." 

" Indeed 1 " said the tidy woman. " Ho ! I wonder Mr. Battens 
talked ! " 

"Is he usually so silent ? " 

"Well, Mr. Battens is the oldest here — that is to say, the 
oldest of the old gentlemen — in point of residence." 

She had a way of passing her hands over and under one another 
as she spoke, that was not only tidy but propitiatory ; so I asked 
her if I might look at her little sitting-room 1 She willingly replied 
Yes, and we went into it together : she leaving the door open, with 
an eye as I understood to the social proprieties. The door opening 
at once into the room without any intervening entry, even scandal 
must have been silenced by the precaution. 

It was a gloomy little chamber, but clean, and with a mug of 
wallflower in the window. On the chimney-piece were two pea- 
cock's feathers, a carved ship, a few shells, and a black profile with 
one eyelash ; whether this portrait purported to be male or female 
passed my comprehension, until my hostess informed me that it 
was her only son, and " quite a speaking one." 

"He is alive, I hope?" 

" No, sir," said the widow, " he were cast away in China." This 
was said with a modest sense of its reflecting a certain geographical 
distinction on his mother. 

" If the old gentlemen here are not given to talking," said I, " I 
hope the old ladies are? — not that you are one." 

She shook her head. " You see they get so cross." 

"How is that?" 

"Well, whether the gentlemen really do deprive us of any little 
matters which ought to be ours by rights, I cannot say for certain ; 
but the opinion of the old ones is they do. And Mr. Battens he 
do even go so far as to doubt whether credit is due to the Founder. 
For Mr. Battens he do say, anyhow he got his name up by it and 
he done it cheap." 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 253 

"I am afraid the pump has soured Mr. Battens." 

"It may be so," returned the tidy widow, " but the handle does 
go very hard. Still, what I say to myself is, the gentleman may 
not pocket the difference between a good pump and a bad one, and 
I would wish to think well of them. And the dwellings," said my 
hostess, glancing round her room; "perhaps they were convenient 
dwellings in the Founder's time, considered as his time, and there- 
fore he should not be blamed. But Mrs. Saggers is very hard 
upon them." 

"Mrs. Saggers is the oldest here?" 

" The oldest but one. Mrs. Quinch being the oldest, and have 
totally lost her head." 

" And you % " 

"I am the youngest in residence, and consequently am not 
looked up to. But when Mrs. Quinch makes a happy release, 
there will be one below me. Nor is it to be expected that Mrs. 
Saggers will prove herself immortal." 

"True. Nor Mr. Battens." 

"Regarding the old gentlemen," said my widow slightingly, 
"they count among themselves. They do not count among us. 
Mr. Battens is that exceptional that he have written to the gen- 
tlemen many times and have worked the case against them. There- 
fore he have took a higher ground. But we do not, as a rule, 
greatly reckon the old gentlemen." 

Pursuing the subject, I found it to be traditionally settled among 
the poor ladies that the poor gentlemen, whatever their ages, were 
all very old indeed, and in a state of dotage. I also discovered 
that the juniors and new comers preserved, for a time, a waning 
disposition to believe in Titbull and his trustees, but that as they 
gained social standing they lost this faith, and disparaged Titbull 
and all his works. 

Improving my acquaintance subsequently with this respected 
lady, whose name was Mrs. Mitts, and occasionally dropping in 
upon her with a little offering of sound Family Hyson in my 
pocket, I gradually became familiar with the inner politics and 
ways of TitbuU's Aims-Houses. But I never could find out who 
the trustees were, or where they were : it being one of the fixed 
ideas of the place that those authorities must be vaguely and 
mysteriously mentioned as " the gentlemen " only. The secretary 
of "the gentlemen " was once pointed out to me, evidently engaged 
in championing the obnoxious pump against the attacks of the dis- 
contented Mr. Battens ; but I am not in a condition to report further 
of him than that he had the sprightly bearing of a lawyer's clerk. 
I had it from Mrs. Mitts's lips in a very confidential moment, that 



254 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Mr. Battens was once " had up before the gentlemen " to stand or 
fall by his accusations, and that an old shoe was thrown after him 
on his departure from the building on this dread errand ; — not 
ineffectually, for, the interview resulting in a plumber, was consid- 
ered to have encircled the temples of Mr. Battens with the wreath 
of victory. 

In Titbull's Alms-Houses, the local society is not regarded as 
good society. A gentleman or lady receiving visitors from without, 
or going out to tea, counts, as it were, accordingly ; but visitings 
or tea-drinkings interchanged among Titbullians do not score. Such 
interchanges, however, are rare, in consequence of internal dissen- 
sions occasioned by Mrs. Saggers's pail : which household article has 
split Titbull's into almost as many parties as there are dwellings 
in that precinct. The extremely complicated nature of the con- 
flicting articles of belief on the subject prevents my stating them 
here with my usual perspicuity, but I think they have all branched 
off from the root-and-trunk question. Has Mrs. Saggers any right 
to stand her pail outside her dwelling? The question has been 
much refined upon, but roughly stated may be stated in those 
terms. 

There are two old men in Titbull's Aims-Houses who, I have 
been given to understand, knew each other in the world beyond its 
pump and iron railings, when they were both " in trade." They 
make the best of their reverses, and are looked upon with great 
contempt. They are little stooping blear-eyed old men of cheerful 
countenance, and they hobble up and down the courtyard wagging 
their chins and talking together quite gaily. This has given offence, 
and has, moreover, raised the question whether they are justified 
in passing any other windows than their own. Mr. Battens, how- 
ever, permitting them to pass his windows, on the disdainful ground 
that their imbecility almost amounts to irresponsibility, they are 
allowed to take their walk in peace. They live next door to one 
another, and take it by turns to read the newspaper aloud (that is 
to say, the newest newspaper they can get), and they play cribbage 
at night. On warm and sunny days they have been known to go 
so far as to bring out two chairs and sit by the iron railings, looking 
forth, but this low conduct, being much remarked upon throughout 
Titbull's, they were deterred by an outraged public opinion from 
repeating it. There is a rumour — but it may be malicious — that 
they hold the memory of Titbull in some weak sort of veneration, 
and that they once set off together on a pilgrimage to the parish 
churchyard to find his tomb. To this, perhaps, might be traced a 
general suspicion that they are spies of " the gentlemen : " to which 
they were supposed to have given colour in my own presence on 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 255 

the occasion of the weak attempt at justification of the pump by 
the gentlemen's clerk ; when they emerged bare-headed from the 
doors of their dwellings, as if their dwellings and themselves con- 
stituted an old-fashioned weather-glass of double action with two 
figures of old ladies inside, and deferentially bowed to him at inter- 
vals until he took his departure. They are understood to be per- 
fectly friendless and relationless. Unquestionably the two poor 
fellows make the very best of their lives in Titbull's Aims-Houses, 
and unquestionably they are (as before mentioned) the subjects of 
unmitigated contempt there. 

On Saturday nights, when there is a greater stir than usual out- 
side, and when itinerant vendors of miscellaneous w^res even take 
their stations and light up their smoky lamps before the iron rail- 
ings, Titbull's becomes flurried. Mrs. Saggers has her celebrated 
palpitations of the heart, for the most part on Saturday nights. 
But Titbull's is unfit to strive with the uproar of the streets in any 
of its phases. It is religiously believed at Titbull's that people push 
more than they used, and likewise that the foremost object of the 
population of England and Wales is to get you down and trample 
on you. Even of railroads they know, at Titbull's, little more 
than the shriek (which Mrs. Saggers says goes through her, and 
ought to be taken up by Government) ; and the penny postage 
may even yet be unknown there, for I have never seen a letter 
delivered to any inhabitant. But there is a tall straight sallow 
lady resident in Number Seven, Titbull's, who never speaks to any- 
body, who is surrounded by a superstitious halo of lost wealth, who 
does her household work in housemaid's gloves, and who is secretly 
much deferred to, though openly cavilled at ; and it has obscurely 
leaked out that this old lady has a son, grandson, nephew, or other 
relative, who is "a Contractor," and who would think it nothing 
of a job to knock down Titbull's, pack it ofi" into Cornwall, and 
knock it together again. An immense sensation was made by a 
gipsy-party calling in a spring-van, to take this old lady up to go 
for a day's pleasure into Epping Forest, and notes were compared 
as to which of the company was the son, grandson, nephew, or 
other relative, the Contractor. A thick-set personage with a white 
hat and a cigar in his mouth, was the favourite : though as Tit- 
bull's had no other reason to believe that the Contractor was there 
at all, than that this man was supposed to eye the chimney stacks 
as if he would like to knock them down and cart them ofi", the 
general mind was much unsettled in arriving at a conclusion. As 
a way out of this diflBculty, it concentrated itself on the acknowl- 
edged Beauty of party, every stitch in whose dress was verbally 
unripped by the old ladies then and there, and whose " goings on " 



256 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

with another and a thinner personage in a white hat might have 
suffused the pump (where they were principally discussed) with 
blushes, for months afterwards. Herein TitbuU's was to Titbull's 
true, for it has a constitutional dislike of all strangers. As con- 
cerning innovations and improvements, it is always of opinion that 
what it does not want itself, nobody ought to want. But I think 
I have met with this opinion outside Titbull's. 

Of the humble treasures of furniture brought into Titbull's by 
the inmates when they establish themselves in that place of con- 
templation for the rest of their days, by far the greater and more 
valuable part belongs to the ladies. I may claim the honour of 
having either ctossed the threshold, or looked in at the door, of 
every one of the nine ladies, and I have noticed that they are all 
particular in the article of bedsteads, and maintain favourite and 
long-established bedsteads and bedding as a regular part of their 
rest. Grenerally an antiquated chest of drawers is among their 
cherished possessions ; a tea-tray always is. I know of at least 
two rooms in which a little tea-kettle of genuine burnished copper, 
vies with the cat in winking at the fire ; and one old lady has a 
tea-urn set forth in state on the top of her chest of drawers, which 
urn is used as her library, and contains four duodecimo volumes, 
and a black-bordered newspaper giving an account of the funeral of 
Her Koyal Highness the Princess Charlotte. Among the poor old 
gentlemen there are no such niceties. Their furniture has the air 
of being contributed, like some obsolete Literary Miscellany, " by 
several hands ; " their few chairs never match ; old patchwork cov- 
erlets linger among them ; and they have an untidy habit of keep- 
ing their wardrobes in hat-boxes. When I recall one old gentleman 
who is rather choice in his shoe-brushes and blacking-bottle, I have 
summed up the domestic elegances of that side of the building. 

On the occurrence of a death in Titbull's, it is invariably agreed 
among the survivors — and it is the only subject on which they do 
agree — that the departed did something "to bring it on." Judg- 
ing by Titbull's, I should say the human race need never die, if 
they took care. But they don't take care, and they do die, and when 
they die in Titbull's they are buried at the cost of the Founda- 
tion. Some provision has been made for the purpose, in virtue of 
which (I record this on the strength of having seen the funeral 
of Mrs. Quinch) a lively neighbouring undertaker dresses up four 
of the old men, and four of the old women, hustles them into a 
procession of four couples, and leads off with a large black bow at 
the back of his hat, looking over his shoulder at them airily from 
time to time to see that no member of the party has got lost, or has 
tumbled down ; as if they w^ere a company of dim old dolls. 




A PHENOMENON AT TITBULL'S. 



258 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Resignation of a dwelling is of very rare occurrence in Titbull's. 
A story does obtain there, how an old lady's son once drew a prize 
of Thirty Thousand Pounds in the Lottery, and presently drove 
to the gate in his own carriage, with French Horns playing up 
behind, and whisked his mother away, and left ten guineas for a 
Feast. But I have been unable to substantiate it by any evidence, 
and regard it as an Aims-House Fairy Tale. It is curious that 
the only proved case of resignation happened within my knowl- 
edge. 

It happened on this wise. There is a sharp competition among 
the ladies respecting the gentility of their visitors, and I have so 
often observed visitors to be dressed as for a holiday occasion, that 
I suppose the ladies to have besought them to make all possible 
display when they come. In these circumstances much excitement 
was one day occasioned by Mrs. Mitts receiving a visit from a 
Greenwich Pensioner. He was a Pensioner of a bluff and warlike 
aiDpearance, with an empty coat-sleeve, and he was got up with 
unusual care ; his coat-buttons were extremely bright, he wore his 
empty coat-sleeve in a graceful festoon, and he had a walking-stick 
in his hand that must have cost money. When, with the head of 
his walking-stick, he knocked at Mrs. Mitts's door — there are no 
knockers in Titbull's — Mrs. Mitts was overheard by a next-door 
neighbour to utter a cry of surprise expressing much agitation ; 
and the same neighbour did afterwards solemnly affirm that when 
he was admitted into Mrs. Mitts's room, she heard a smack. 
Heard a smack which was not a blow. 

There was an air about this Greenwich Pensioner when he took 
his departure, which imbued all Titbull's with the conviction that 
he was coming again. He was eagerly looked for, and Mrs. Mitts 
was closely watched. In the meantime, if anything could have 
placed the unfortunate six old gentlemen at a greater disadvantage 
than that at which they chronically stood, it would have been the 
apparition of this Greenwich Pensioner. They were well shrunken 
already, but they shrunk to nothing in comparison with the Pen- 
sioner. Even the poor old gentlemen themselves seemed conscious 
of their inferiority, and to know submissively that they could never 
hope to hold their own against the Pensioner with his warlike and 
maritime experience in the past, and his tobacco money in the 
present : his chequered career of blue water, black gunpowder, and 
red bloodshed for England home and beauty. 

Before three weeks were out, the Pensioner reappeared. Again 
he knocked at Mrs. Mitts's door with the handle of his stick, and 
again was he admitted. But not again did he depart alone ; for 
Mrs. Mitts, in a bonnet identified as having been re-embelhshed, 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 259 

went out walking with him, and stayed out till the ten o'clock 
beer, Greenwich time. 

There was now a truce, even as to the troubled waters of 
Mrs. Saggers's pail ; nothing was spoken of among the ladies but 
the conduct of Mrs. Mitts and its blighting influence on the reputa- 
tion of Titbull's. It was agreed that Mr. Battens " ought to take 
it up," and Mr. Battens was communicated with on the subject. 
That unsatisfactory individual replied " that he didn't see his way 
yet," and it was unanimously voted by the ladies that aggravation 
was in his nature. 

How it came to pass, with some appearance of inconsistency, 
that Mrs. Mitts was cut by all the ladies and the Pensioner 
admired by all the ladies, matters not. Before another week was 
out, Titbull's was startled by another phenomenon. At ten o'clock 
in the forenoon appeared a cab, containing not only the Greenwich 
Pensioner with one arm, but, to boot, a Chelsea Pensioner with 
one leg. Both dismounting to assist Mrs. Mitts into the cab, the 
Greenwich Pensioner bore her company inside, and the Chelsea 
Pensioner mounted the box by the driver : his wooden leg sticking 
out after the manner of a bowsprit, as if in jocular homage to his 
friend's seagoing career. Thus the equipage drove away. No 
Mrs. Mitts returned that night. 

What Mr. Battens might have done in the matter of taking it 
up, goaded by the infuriated state of public feeling next morning, 
was anticipated by another phenomenon. A Truck, propelled by 
the Greenwich Pensioner and the Chelsea Pensioner, each placidly 
smoking a pipe, and pushing his warrior breast against the handle. 

The display on the part of the Greenwich Pensioner of his 
" marriage-lines," and his announcement that himself and friend had 
looked in for the furniture of Mrs. G. Pensioner, late Mitts, by no 
means reconciled the ladies to the conduct of their sister ; on the 
contrary, it is said that they appeared more than ever exasperated. 
Nevertheless, my stray visits to Titbull's since the date of this 
occurrence, have confirmed me in an impression that it was a 
wholesome fillip. The nine ladies are smarter, both in mind and 
dress, than they used to be, though it must be admitted that they 
despise the six gentlemen to the last extent. They have a much 
greater interest in the external thoroughfare too, than they had 
when I first knew Titbull's. And whenever I chance to be leaning 
my back against the pump or the iron railings, and to be talking 
to one of the junior ladies, and to see that a flush has passed over 
her face, I immediately know without looking round that a Green- 
wich Pensioner has gone past. 



260 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

All the Year Round, Vol. 20, No. 494, Oct. 10, 1868. 
XXX. 

THE EUFFIAN. 

I ENTERTAIN SO stiong an objection to the euphonious softening 
of Ruffian into Rough, which has lately become popular, that I 
restore the right word to the heading of this paper ; the rather, as 
my object is to dwell upon the fact that the Ruffian is tolerated 
among us to an extent that goes beyond all unruffianly endurance. 
I take the liberty to believe that if the Ruffian besets my life, a 
professional Ruffian at large in the open streets of a great city, 
notoriously having no other calling than that of Ruffian, and of 
disquieting and despoiling me as I go peacefully about my lawful 
business, interfering with no one, then the Government under which 
I have the great constitutional privilege, supreme honour and 
happiness, and all the rest of it, to exist, breaks down in the dis- 
charge of any Government's most simple elementary duty. 

What did I read in the London daily papers, in the early days 
of this last September? That the Police had "At length suc- 
ceeded IN CAPTURING TwO OF THE NOTORIOUS GANG THAT HAVE 
SO LONG INFESTED THE WATERLOO ROAD." Is it poSsiblc ? What 

a wonderful Police ! Here is a straight, broad, public thorough- 
fare of immense resort ; half a mile long ; gas-lighted by night ■ 
with a great gas-lighted railway station in it, extra the street 
lamps ; full of shops ; traversed by two popular cross thoroughfares 
of considerable traffic ; itself the main road to the South of London ; 
and the admirable Police have, after long infestment of this dark 
and lonely spot by a gang of Ruffians, actually got hold of two of 
them. Why, can it be doubted that any man of fair London 
knowledge and common resolution, armed with the powers of the 
Law, could have captured the whole confederacy in a week ? 

It is to the saving up of the Ruffian class by the Magistracy 
and Police — to the conventional preserving of them, as if they 
were Partridges — that their number and audacity must be in great 
part referred. Why is a notorious Thief and Ruffian ever left at 
large 1 He never turns his liberty to any account but violence and 
plunder, he never did a day's work out of gaol, he never will do a 
day's work out of gaol. As a proved notorious Thief he is always 
consignable to prison for three months. When he comes out, he 
is surely as notorious a Thief as he was when he went in. Then 
send him back again. " Just Heaven ! " cries the Society for the 
protection of remonstrant Ruffians. " This is equivalent to a sen- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 261 

tence of perpetual imprisonment ! " Precisely for that reason it has 
my advocacy. I demand to have the Ruffian kept out of my way, 
and out of the way of all decent people. I demand to have the 
Ruffian employed, perforce, in hewing wood and drawing water 
somewhere for the general service, instead of hewing at her Majesty's 
subjects and drawing their watches out of their pockets. If this 
be termed an unreasonable demand, then the tax-gatherer's demand 
on me must be far more unreasonable, and cannot be otherwise 
than extortionate and unjust. 

It will be seen that I treat of the Thief and Ruffian as one. I 
do so, because I know the two characters to be one, in the vast 
majority of cases, just as well as the Police know it. (As to the 
Magistracy, with a few exceptions, they know nothing about it but 
what the Police choose to tell them.) There are disorderly classes 
of men who are not thieves ; as railway-navigators, brickmakers, 
wood-sawyers, costermongers. These classes are often disorderly 
and troublesome ; but it is mostly among themselves, and at any 
rate they have their industrious avocations, they work early and 
late, and work hard. The generic Ruffian — honourable member 
for w^hat is tenderly called the Rough Element — is either a Thief, 
or the companion of Thieves. When he infamously molests women 
coming out of chapel on Sunday evenings (for which I would have 
his back scarified often and deep) it is not only for the gratification 
of his pleasant instincts, but that there may be a confusion raised 
by which either he or his friends may profit, in the commission of 
highway robberies or in picking pockets. When he gets a police- 
constable down and kicks him helpless for life, it is because that 
constable once did his duty in bringing him to justice. When he 
rushes into the bar of a public-house and scoops an eye out of one 
of the company there, or bites his ear off, it is because the man he 
maims gave evidence against him. W^hen he and a line of com- 
rades extending across the footway — say of that solitary mountain- 
spur of the Abruzzi, the Waterloo Road — advance towards me 
" skylarking " among themselves, my purse or shirt-pin is in 
predestined peril from his playfulness. Always a Ruffian, always 
a Thief. Always a Thief, always a Ruffian. 

Now, when I, who am not paid to know these things, know 
them daily on the evidence of my senses and experience ; when I 
know that the Ruffian never jostles a lady in the streets, or knocks 
a hat off, but in order that the Thief may profit, is it surprising 
that I should require from those who are paid to know these things, 
prevention of them 1 

Look at this group at a street corner. Number one is a shirk- 
ing fellow of five-and-twenty, in an iU-favoured and ill-savoured suit, 



262 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

his trousers of corduroy, his coat of some indiscernible groundwork 
for the deposition of grease, his neckerchief like an eel, his com- 
plexion like dirty dough, his mangy fur cap pulled low upon his 
beetle brows to hide the prison cut of his hair. His hands are in 
his pockets. He puts them there when they are idle, as naturally 
as in other people's pockets when they are busy, for he knows that 
they are not roughened by work, and that they tell a tale. Hence, 
whenever he takes one out to draw a sleeve across his nose — 
which is often, for he has weak eyes and a constitutional cold in 
his head — he restores it to its pocket immediately afterwards. 
Number two is a burly brute of five-and-thirty, in a tall stiff hat ; 
is a composite as to his clothes of betting-man and fighting-man ; 
is whiskered ; has a staring pin in his breast, along with his right 
hand; has insolent and cruel eyes; large shoulders; strong legs, 
booted and tipped for kicking. Number three is forty years of age ; 
is short, thick-set, strong, and bow-legged ; wears knee cords and 
white stockings, a very long-sleeved waistcoat, a very large necker- 
chief doubled or trebled round his throat, and a crumpled white 
hat crowns his ghastly parchment face. This fellow looks like an 
executed postboy of other days, cut down from the gallows too 
soon, and restored and preserved by express diabolical agency. 
Numbers five, six, and seven, are hulking, idle, slouching young 
men, patched and shabby, too short in the sleeves and too tight in 
the legs, slimily clothed, foul-spoken, repulsive wretches inside and 
out. In all the party there obtains a certain twitching character 
of mouth and furtiveness of eye, that hint how the coward is lurk- 
ing under the bully. The hint is quite correct, for they are a 
slinking sneaking set, far more prone to lie down on their backs 
and kick out, when in difficulty, than to make a stand for it. 
(This may account for the street mud on the backs of Numbers 
five, six, and seven, being much fresher than the stale splashes on 
their legs.) 

These engaging gentry a Police-constable stands contemplating. 
His Station, with a Reserve of assistance, is very near at hand. 
They cannot pretend to any trade, not even to be porters or 
messengers. It would be idle if they did, for he knows them, and 
they know that he knows them, to be nothing but professed Thieves 
and Ruffians. He knows where they resort, knows by what slang 
names they call one another, knows how often they have been in 
prison, and how long, and for what. All this is known at his 
Station, too, and is (or ought to be) known at Scotland Yard, too. 
But does he know, or does his Station know, or does Scotland Yard 
know, or does anybody know, why these fellows should be here at 
liberty, when, as reputed Thieves to whom a whole Division of 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 263 

Police could swear, they might all be under lock and key at hard 
labour ? Not he ; truly he would be a wise man if he did ! He 
only knows that these are members of the "notorious gang," which, 
according to the newspaper Police-office reports of this last past 
September, "have so long infested" the awful solitudes of the 
Waterloo Road, and out of which almost impregnable fastnesses 
the Police have at length dragged Two, to the unspeakable admira- 
tion of all good civilians. 

The consequences of this contemplative habit on the part of the 
Executive — a habit to be looked for in a hermit, but not in a 
Police System — ■ are familiar to us all. The Ruffian becomes one 
of the established orders of the body politic. Under the playful 
name of Rough (as if he were merely a practical joker) his move- 
ments and successes are recorded on public occasions. Whether 
he mustered in large numbers, or small ; whether he was in good 
spirits, or depressed; whether he turned his generous exertions to 
very prosperous account, or Fortune was against him ; whether he 
was in a sanguinary mood, or robbed with amiable horse-play and 
a gracious consideration for life and limb ; all this is chronicled as 
if he were an Institution. Is there any city in Europe, out of 
England, in which these terms are held with the pests of Society ? 
Or in which, at this day, such violent robberies from the person are 
constantly committed as in London ? 

The Preparatory Schools of Ruffianism are similarly borne with. 
The young Ruffians of London — not Thieves yet, but training for 
scholarships and fellowships in the Criminal Court Universities — 
molest quiet people and their property, to an extent that is hardly 
credible. The throwing of stones in the streets has become a 
dangerous and destructive offence, which surely could have got to 
no greater height though we had had no Police but our own riding- 
whips and walking-sticks — the Police to which I myself appeal 
on these occasions. The throwing of stones at the windows of 
railway carriages in motion — an act of wanton wickedness with 
the very Arch-Fiend's hand in it — had become a crying evil, 
when the railway companies forced it on Police notice. Constabular 
contemplation had until then been the order of the day. 

Within these twelve months, there arose among the young gentle- 
men of London aspiring to Ruffianism, and cultivating that much- 
encouraged social art, a facetious cry of "I'll have this ! " accom- 
panied with a clutch at some article of a passing lady's dress. I 
have known a lady's veil to be thus humorously torn from her face 
and carried off in the open streets at noon, and I have had the 
honour of myself giving chase, on Westminster Bridge, to another 
young Ruffian, who, in full daylight early on a summer evening, had 



264 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

nearly thrown a modest young woman into a swoon of indignation 
and confusion, by his shameful manner of attacking her with this 
cry as she harmlessly passed along before me. Mr. Carlyle, 
some time since, awakened a little pleasantry by writing of his own 
experience of the Ruffian of the streets, I have seen the Ruffian 
act in exact accordance with Mr. Cariyle's description, innumerable 
times, and I never saw him cBecked. 

The blaring use of the very worst language possible, in our public 
thoroughfares — especially in those set apart for recreation — is 
another disgrace to us, and another result of constabular contem- 
plation, the like of which I have never heard in any other country 
to which my uncommercial travels have extended. Years ago, when 
I had a near interest in certain children who were sent with their 
nurses, for air and exercise, into the Regent's Park, I found this 
evil to be so abhorrent and horrible there, that I called public 
attention to it, and also to its contemplative reception by the Police. 
Looking afterwards into the newest Police Act, and finding that 
the offence was punishable under it, I resolved, when striking 
occasion should arise, to try my hand as prosecutor. The occasion 
arose soon enough, and I ran the following gauntlet. 

The utterer of the base coin in question was a girl of seventeen 
or eighteen, who, with a suitable attendance of blackguards, youths, 
and boys, was flaunting along the streets, returning from an Irish 
funeral, in a Progress interspersed with singing and dancing. She 
had turned round to me and expressed herself in the most audible 
manner, to the great delight of that select circle. I attended the 
party, on the opposite side of the way, for a mile further, and then 
encountered a Police-constable. The party had made themselves 
merry at my expense until now, but seeing me speak to the con- 
stable, its male members instantly took to their heels, leaving the 
girl alone. I asked the constable did he know my name ? Yes, 
he did. " Take that girl into custody, on my charge, for using 
bad language in the streets." He had never heard of such a 
charge. I had. Would he take my word that he should get into 
no trouble 1 Yes, sir, he would do that. So he took the girl, and 
I went home for my Police Act. 

With this potent instrument in my pocket, I literally as well 
as figuratively "returned to the charge," and presented myself 
at the Police Station of the district. There, I found on duty a very 
intelligent Inspector (they are all intelligent men), who, likewise, 
had never heard of such a charge. I showed him my clause, and 
we went over it together twice or thrice. It was plain, and I 
engaged to wait upon the suburban Magistrate to-morrow morning 
at ten o'clock. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 265 

In the morning I put my Police Act in my pocket again, and 
waited on the suburban Magistrate. I was not quite so courteously 
received by him as I should have been by The Lord Chancellor or 
The Lord Chief Justice, but that was a question of good breeding 
on the suburban Magistrate's part, and I had my clause ready with 
its leaf turned down. Which was enough for me. 

Conference took place between the Magistrate and clerk 
respecting the charge. During conference I was evidently regarded 
as a much more objectionable person than the prisoner; — one 
giving trouble by coming there voluntarily, which the prisoner 
could not be accused of doing. The prisoner had been got up, 
since I last had the pleasure of seeing her, with a great effect of white 
apron and straw bonnet. She reminded me of an elder sister 
of Red Riding Hood, and I seemed to remind the sympathising 
Chimney Sweep by whom she was attended, of the Wolf. 

The Magistrate was doubtful, Mr. Uncommercial Traveller, 
whether this charge could be entertained. It was not known. 
Mr. Uncommercial Traveller replied that he wished it Avere better 
known, and that, if he could afford the leisure, he would use his 
endeavours to make it so. There was no question about it, how- 
ever, he contended. Here was the clause. 

The clause was handed in, and more conference resulted. After 
which I was asked the extraordinary question : " Mr. Uncommer- 
cial, do you really wish this girl to be sent to prison ? " To which 
I grimly answered, staring : " If I didn't, why should I take the 
trouble to come here?" Finally, I was sworn, and gave my 
agreeable evidence in detail, and White Riding Hood was fined 
ten shillings, under the clause, or sent to prison for so many days. 
" Why, Lord bless you, sir," said the Police-officer, who showed me 
out, with a great enjoyment of the jest of her having been got up 
so effectively, and caused so much hesitation : " If she goes to 
prison, that will be nothing new to her. She comes from Charles 
Street, Drury Lane ! " 

The Police, all things considered, are an excellent force, and I 
have borne my small testimony to their merits. Constabular con- 
templation is the result of a bad system; a system which is 
administered, not invented, by the man in constable's uniform, 
employed at twenty shillings a week. He has his orders, and 
would be marked for discouragement if he overstepped them. 
That the system is bad, there needs no lengthened argument to 
prove, because the fact is self-evident. If it were anything else, 
the results that have attended it could not possibly have come to 
pass. Who will say that under a good system, our streets could 
have got into their present state ? 



260 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLEK. 

The objection to the whole Police system, as concerning the 
Ruffian, may be stated, and its failure exemplified, as follows. It 
is well known that on all great occasions, when they come together 
in numbers, the mass of the English people are their own trust- 
worthy Police. It is well known that wheresoever there is col- 
lected together any fair general representation of the people, a 
respect for law and order, and a determination to discountenance 
lawlessness and disorder, may be relied upon. As to one another, 
the people are a very good Police, and yet are quite willing in their 
good-nature that the stipendiary Police should have the credit of 
the people's moderation. But we are all of us powerless against 
the Ruffian, because we submit to the law, and it is his only trade, 
by superior force and by violence, to defy it. Moreover, we are 
constantly admonished from high places (like so many Sunday- 
school children out for a holiday of buns and milk-and-water) that 
we are not to take the law into our own hands, but are to hand 
our defence over to it. It is clear that the common enemy to be 
punished and exterminated first of all is the Ruffian. It is clear 
that he is, of all others, the offender for whose repressal we main- 
tain a costly system of Police. Him, therefore, we expressly pre- 
sent to the Police to deal with, conscious that, on the whole, we 
can, and do, deal reasonably well with one another. Him the 
Police deal with so inefficiently and absurdly that he flourishes, 
and multiplies, and, with all his evil deeds upon his head as noto- 
riously as his hat is, pervades the streets with no more let or hin- 
drance than ourselves. 



All the Year Round, New Series, Vol. 1, Wo. 1, Dec. 5, 1868. 
XXXI. 

ABOARD SHIP. 

My journeys as Uncommercial Traveller for the firm of Human- 
Interest Brothers have not slackened since I last reported of them, 
but have kept me continually on the move. I remain in the same 
idle employment. I never solicit an order, I never get any com- 
mission, I am the rolling stone that gathers no moss, — unless any 
should by chance be found among these samples. 

Some half a year ago, I found myself in my idlest, dreamiest, and 
least accountable condition altogether, on board ship, in the harbour 
of the city of New York, in the United States of America. Of all 
the good ships afloat, mine was the good steamship ''Russia," 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 267 

Capt. Cook, Cunard Line, bound for Liverpool. What more could 
I wish for ? 

I had nothing to wish for but a prosperous passage. My salad- 
days, when I was green of visage and sea-sick, being gone with 
better things (and no worse), no coming event cast its shadow 
before. 

I might but a few moments previously have imitated Sterne, 
and said, " 'And yet, methinks, Eugenius,' — laying my forefinger 
wistfully on his coat-sleeve, thus, — ' and yet, methinks, Eugenius, 
'tis but sorry work to part with thee, for what fresh j&elds, . . . 
my dear Eugenius, . . . can be fresher than thou art, and in what 
pastures new shall I find Eliza, or call her, Eugenius, if thou wilt, 
Annie?'" — I say I might have done this; but Eugenius was 
gone, and I hadn't done it. 

I was resting on a skylight on the hurricane-deck, watching the 
working of the ship very slowly about, that she might head for 
England, It was high-noon on a most brilliant day in April, and 
the beautiful bay was glorious and glowing. Full many a time, 
on shore there, had I seen the snow come down, down, down 
(itself like down), until it lay deep in all the ways of men, and 
particularly, as it seemed, in my way, for I had not gone dry-shod 
many hours for months. Within two or three days last past had 
I watched the feathery fall setting in with the ardour of a new 
idea, instead of dragging at the skirts of a worn-out winter, and 
permitting glimpses of a fresh young spring. But a bright sun and 
a clear sky had melted the snow in the great crucible of nature ; 
and it had been poured out again that morning over sea and land, 
transformed into myriads of gold and silver sparkles. 

The ship was fragrant with flowers. Something of the old 
Mexican passion for flowers may have gradually passed into North 
America, where flowers are luxuriously grown, and tastefully com- 
bined in the richest profusion ; but, be that as it may, such gor- 
geous farewells in flowers had come on board, that the small oflScer's 
cabin on deck, which I tenanted, bloomed over into the adjacent 
scuppers, and banks of other flowers that it couldn't hold made a 
garden of the unoccupied tables in the passengers' saloon. These 
delicious scents of the shore, mingling with the fresh airs of the 
sea, made the atmosphere a dreamy, an enchanting one. And so, 
with the watch aloft setting all the sails, and with the screw below 
revolving at a mighty rate, and occasionally giving the ship an 
angry shake for resisting, I fell into my idlest ways, and lost 
myself 

As, for instance, whether it was I lying there, or some other entity 
even more mysterious, was a matter I was far too lazy to look 



268 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

into. What did it signify to rae if it were I ? or to the more mys- 
terious entity, if it were he? Equally as to the remembrances 
that drowsily floated by me, or by him, why ask when or where 
the things happened ? Was it not enough that they befell at some 
time, somewhere? 

There was that assisting at the church service on board another 
steamship, one Sunday, in a stiff" breeze. Perhaps on the passage 
out. No matter. Pleasant to hear the ship's bells go as like 
church-bells as they could; pleasant to see the watch off" duty 
mustered and come in : best hats, best Guernseys, washed hands 
and faces, smoothed heads. But then arose a set of circumstances 
so rampantly comical, that no check which the gravest intentions 
could put upon them would hold them in hand. Thus the scene. 
Some seventy passengers assembled at the saloon tables. Prayer- 
books on tables. Ship rolling heavily. Pause. No minister. 
Rumour has rela,ted that a modest young clergyman on board has 
responded to the captain's request that he will officiate. Pause 
again, and very heavy rolling. 

Closed double doors suddenly burst open, and two strong stew- 
ards skate in, supporting minister between them. General appear- 
ance as of somebody picked up drunk and incapable, and under 
conveyance to station-house. Stoppage, pause, and particularly 
heavy rolling. Stewards watch their opportunity, and balance 
themselves, but cannot balance minister ; who, struggling with a 
drooping head and a backward tendency, seems determined to 
return below, while they are as determined that he shall be got to 
the reading-desk in mid-saloon. Desk portable, sliding away down 
a long table, and aiming itself at the breasts of various members 
of the congregation. Here the double doors, which have been 
carefully closed by other stewards, fly open again, and worldly 
passenger tumbles in, seemingly with pale-ale designs : who, seeking 
friend, says "Joe!" Perceiving incongruity, says, "Hullo! Beg 
yer pardon ! " and tumbles out again. All this time the congrega- 
tion have been breaking up into sects, — as the manner of con- 
gregations often is, — each sect sliding away by itself, and all 
pounding the weakest sect which slid first into the corner. Utmost 
point of dissent soon attained in every corner, and violent rolling. 
Stewards at length make a dash; conduct minister to the mast in 
the centre of the saloon, which he embraces with both arms ; skate 
out ; and leave him in that condition to arrange affairs with flock. 

There was another Sunday, when an officer of the ship read the 
service. It was quiet and impressive, until we fell upon the dan- 
gerous and perfectly unnecessary experiment of striking up a hymn. 
After it was given out, we all rose, but everybody left it to some- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLEH. 269 

body else to begin. Silence resulting, the ofl&cer (no singer himself) 
rather reproachfully gave us the first line again, upon which a rosy 
pippin of an old gentleman, remarkable throughout the passage for 
his cheerful politeness, gave a little stamp with his boot (as if he 
were leading off a country dance), and blithely warbled us into a 
show of joining. At the end of the first verse we became, through 
these tactics, so much refreshed and encouraged, that none of us, 
howsoever unmelodious, would submit to be left out of the second 
verse ; while as to the third we lifted up our voices in a sacred 
howl that left it doubtful whether we were the more boastful of 
the sentiments we united in professing, or of professing them with 
a most discordant defiance of time and tune. 

" Lord bless us ! " thought I, when a fresh remembrance of 
these things made me laugh heartily alone in the dead water- 
gurgling waste of the night, what time I was wedged into my berth 
by a wooden bar, or I must have rolled out of it, "what errand 
was I then upon, and to what Abyssinian point had public events 
then marched? No matter as to me. And as to them, if the 
wonderful popular rage for a plaything (utterly confounding in its 
inscrutable unreason) had not then lighted on a poor young savage 
boy, and a poor old screw of a horse, and hauled the first off by 
the hair of his princely head to ' inspect ' British volunteers, and 
hauled the second off by the hair of his equine tail to the Crystal 
Palace, why so much the better for all of us outside Bedlam ! " 

So, sticking to the ship, I was at the trouble of asking myself 
would I like to show the grog distribution in " the fiddle " at noon 
to the Grand United Amalgamated Total Abstinence Society 1 Yes, 
I think I should. I think it would do them good to smell the rum, 
under the circumstances. Over the grog, mixed in a bucket, pre- 
sides the boatswain's mate, small tin can in hand. Enter the crew, 
the guilty consumers, the grown-up brood of Giant Despair, in con- 
tradistinction to the band of youthful angel Hope. Some in boots, 
some in leggings, some in tarpaulin overalls, some in frocks, some in 
pea-coats, a very few in jackets, most with sou'wester hats, all with 
something rough and rugged round the throat ; all, dripping salt 
water where they stand; all pelted by weather, besmeared with 
grease, and blackened by the sooty rigging. 

Each man's knife in its sheath in his girdle, loosened for dinner. 
As the first man, with a knowingly kindled eye, watches the filling 
of the poisoned chalice (truly but a very small tin mug, to be prosaic), 
and, tossing back his head, tosses the contents into himself, and 
passes the empty chalice and passes on, so the second man with an 
anticipatory wipe of his mouth or sleeve or handkerchief, bides his 
turn, and drinks and hands and passes on, in whom, and in each 



270 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

as his turn approaches, beams a knowingly kindled eye, a brighter 
temper, and a suddenly awakened tendency to be jocose with some 
shipmate. Nor do I even observe that the man in charge of the 
ship's lamps, who in right of his office has a double allowance of 
poisoned chalices, seems thereby vastly degraded, even though he 
empties the chalices into himself, one after the other, mucli as if he 
were delivering their contents at some absorbent establishment in 
which he had no personal interest. But vastly comforted, I note 
them all to be, on deck presently, even to the circulation of redder 
blood in their cold blue knuckles ; and when I look up at them lying 
out on the yards, and holding on for life among the beating sails, I 
cannot for my life see the justice of visiting on them — or on me — 
the drunken crimes of any number of criminals arraigned at the 
heaviest of assizes. 

Abetting myself in my idle humour, I closed my eyes, and re- 
called life on board of one of those mail-packets, as I lay, part of 
that day, in the Bay of New York, ! The regular life began — 
mine always did, for I never got to sleep afterwards — with the 
rigging of the pump while it was yet dark, and washing down of 
decks. Any enormous giant at a prodigious hydropathic establish- 
ment, conscientiously undergoing the water-cure in all its depart- 
ments, and extremely particular about cleaning his teeth, would 
make those noises. Swash, splash, scrub, rub, toothbrush, bubble, 
swash, splash, bubble, toothbrush, splash, splash, bubble, rub. 
Then the day would break, and, descending from my berth by a 
graceful ladder composed of half-opened drawers beneath it, I would 
reopen my outer dead-light and my inner sliding window (closed by 
a watchman during the water-cure), and would look out at the long- 
rolling, lead-coloured, white-topped waves over which the dawn, on 
a cold winter morning, cast a level, lonely glance, and through which 
the ship fought her melancholy way at a terrific rate. And now, 
lying down again, awaiting the season for broiled ham and tea, I 
would be compelled to listen to the voice of conscience, — the screw. 

It might be, in some cases, no more than the voice of stomach ; 
but I called it in my fancy by the higher name. Because it seemed 
to me that we were all of us, all day long, endeavouring to stifle 
the voice. Because it was under everybody's pillow, everybody's 
plate, everybody's camp-stool, everybody's book, everybody's occu- 
pation. Because we pretended not to hear it, especially at meal- 
times, evening whist, and morning conversation on deck ; but it was 
always among us in an under monotone, not to be drowned in pea- 
soup, not to be shuffled with cards, not to be diverted by books, 
not to be knitted into any pattern, not to be walked away from. It 
was smoked in the weediest cigar, and drunk in the strongest cock- 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 271 

tail j it was conveyed on deck at noon with limp ladies, who lay 
there in their wrappers until the stars shone ; it waited at table 
with the stewards ; nobody could put it out with the lights. It 
was considered (as on shore) ill-bred to acknowledge the voice of 
conscience. It was not polite to mention it. One squally day an 
amiable gentleman in love gave much offence to a surrounding circle, 
including the object of his attachment, by saying of it, after it 
had goaded him over two easy-chairs and a skylight, " Screw ! " 

Sometimes it would appear subdued. In fleeting moments, 
when bubbles of champagne pervaded the nose, or when there was 
" hot pot " in the bill of fare, or when an old dish we had had 
regularly every day was described in that official document by a 
new name, — under such excitements, one would almost believe it 
hushed. The ceremony of washing plates on deck, performed after 
every meal by a circle as of ringers of crockery triple-bob majors for 
a prize, would keep it down. Hauling the reel, taking the sun at 
noon, posting the twenty-four hours' run, altering the ship's time by 
the meridian, casting the waste food overboard, and attracting the 
eager gulls that followed in our wake, — these events would suppress 
it for a while. But the instant any break or pause took place in any 
such diversion, the voice would be at it again, importuning us to 
the last extent. A newly married young pair, who walked the deck 
affectionately some twenty miles per day, would, in the full flush 
of their exercise, suddenly become stricken by it, and stand trem- 
bling, but otherwise immovable, under its reproaches. 

When this terrible monitor was most severe with us was when 
the time approached for our retiring to our dens for the night; 
when the lighted candles in the saloon grew fewer and fewer ; when 
the deserted glasses with spoons in them grew more and more nu- 
merous ; when waifs of toasted cheese and strays of sardines fried 
in batter slid languidly to and fro in the table-racks ; when the man 
who always read had shut up his book, and blown out his candle ; 
when the man who always talked had ceased from troubling ; when 
the man who was always medically reported as going to have delir- 
ium tremens had put it off till to-morrow; when the man who 
every night devoted himself to a midnight smoke on deck two hours 
in length, and who every night was in bed within ten minutes after- 
wards, was buttoning himself up in his third coat for his hardy 
vigil : for then, as we fell off one by one, and, entering our several 
hutches, came into a peculiar atmosphere of bilge- water and Wind- 
sor soap, the voice would shake us to the centre. Woe to us when 
we sat down on our sofa, watching the swinging candle for ever 
trying and retrying to stand upon his head ! or our coat upon its 
peg, imitating us as we appeared in our gymnastic days by sustain- 



272 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

ing itself horizontally from the wall, in emulation of the lighter and 
more facile towels ! Then would the voice especially claim us for 
its prey, and rend us all to pieces. 

Lights out, we in our berths, and the wind rising, the voice grows 
angrier and deeper. Under the mattress and under the pillow, 
under the sofa and under the washing-stand, under the ship and 
under the sea, seeming to rise from the foundations under the earth 
with every scoop of the great Atlantic (and oh ! why scoop so ?), 
always the voice. Vain to deny its existence in the night season ; 
impossible to be hard of hearing ; screw, screw, screw ! Sometimes 
it lifts out of the water, and revolves with a whirr, like a ferocious 
firework, — except that it never expends itself, but is always ready 
to go off again ; sometimes it seems to be in anguish, and shivers ; 
sometimes it seems to be terrified by its last plunge, and has a fit 
which causes it to struggle, quiver, and for an instant stop. And 
now the ship sets in rolling, as only ships so fiercely screwed through 
time and space, day and night, fair weather and foul, can roll. 

Did she ever take a roll before like that last? Did she ever 
take a roll before like this worse one that is coming now ? Here is 
the partition at my ear down in the deep on the lee side. Are we 
ever coming up again together ? I think not ; the partition and I 
are so long about it that I really do believe we have overdone it 
this time. Heavens, what a scoop ! What a deep scoop, what a 
hollow scoop, what a long scoop ! Will it ever end, and can we 
bear the heavy mass of water we have taken on board, and which 
has let loose all the table furniture in the officers' mess, and has 
beaten open the door of the little passage between the purser and 
me, and is swashing about, even there and even here ? The purser 
snores reassuringly, and the ship's bells striking, I hear the cheer- 
ful " All's well ! " of the watch musically given back the length of 
the deck, as the lately diving partition, now high in air, tries (un- 
softened by what we have gone through together) to force me out 
of bed and berth. 

"All's well ! " Comforting to know, though surely all might be 
better. Put aside the rolling and the rush of water, and think of 
darting through such darkness with such velocity. Think of any 
other similar object coming in the opposite direction ! 

Whether there may be an attraction in two such moving bodies 
out at sea, which may help accident to bring them into collision 1 
Thoughts, too, arise (the voice never silent all the while, but mar- 
vellously suggestive) of the gulf below ; of the strange unfruitful 
mountain ranges and deep valleys over which we are passing ; of 
monstrous fish midway ; of the ship's suddenly altering her course 
on her own account, and with a wild plunge settling down, and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 273 

making that voyage with a crew of dead discoverers. Now, too, 
one recalls an almost universal tendency on the part of passengers 
to stumble, at some time or other in the day, on the topic of a 
certain large steamer making this same run, which was lost at sea, 
and never heard of more. Everybody has seemed under a spell, 
compelling approach to the threshold of the grim subject, stoppage, 
discomfiture, and pretence of never having been near it. The boat- 
swain's whistle sounds ! A change in the wind, hoarse orders issu- 
ing, and the watch very busy. Sails come crashing home overhead, 
ropes (that seem all knot) ditto ; every man engaged appears to 
have twenty feet, with twenty times the average amount of stamp- 
ing power in each. Gradually the noise slackens, the hoarse cries 
die away, the boatswain's whistle softens into the soothing and 
contented notes, which rather reluctantly admit that the job is 
done for the time, and the voice sets in again. 

Thus come unintelligible dreams of up hill and down, and swing- 
ing and swaying, until consciousness revives of atmospherical Wind- 
sor soap and bilge-water, and the voice announces that the giant 
has come for the water-cure again. 

Such were my fanciful reminiscences as I lay, part of that day, in 
the Bay of New York, ! Also as we passed clear of the Nar- 
rows, and got out to sea ; also in many an idle hour at sea in 
sunny weather ! At length the observations and computations 
showed that we should make the coast of Ireland to-night. So 
I stood watch on deck all night to-night, to see how we made the 
coast of Ireland. 

Very dark, and the sea most brilliantly phosphorescent. Great 
way on the ship, and double look-out kept. Vigilant captain on 
the bridge, vigilant first officer looking over the port side, vigilant 
second officer standing by the quarter-master at the compass, vigi- 
lant third officer posted at the stern rail with a lantern. No pas- 
sengers on the quiet decks, but expectation everywhere nevertheless. 
The two men at the wheel very steady, very serious, and very 
prompt to answer orders. An order issued sharply now and then, 
and echoed back ; otherwise the night drags slowly, silently, with 
no change. 

All of a sudden, at the blank hour of two in the morning, a 
vague movement of relief from a long strain expresses itself in all 
hands ; the third officer's lantern twinkles, and he fires a rocket, 
and another rocket. A sullen solitary light is pointed out to me 
in the black sky yonder. A change is expected in the light, but 
none takes place. "Give them two more rockets, Mr. Vigilant." 
Two more, and a blue-light burnt. All eyes watch the light again. 
At last a little toy sky-rocket is flashed up from it ; and, even as 



274 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

that small streak in the darkness dies away, we are telegraphed 
to Queenstown, Liverpool, and London, and back again under the 
ocean to America. 

Then up come the half-dozen passengers who are going ashore 
at Queenstown, and up comes the mail-agent in charge of the bags, 
and up come the men who are to carry the bags into the mail- 
tender that will ' come off for them out of the harbour. Lamps 
and lanterns gleam here and there about the decks, and impeding 
bulks are knocked away with handspikes ; and the port-side bul- 
wark, barren but a moment ago, bursts into a crop of heads of 
seamen, stewards, and engineers. 

The light begins to be gained upon, begins to be alongside, begins 
to be left astern. More rockets, and, between us and the land, 
steams beautifully the Inman steamship City of Paris, for New 
York, outward bound. We observe with complacency that the 
wind is dead against her (it being with us), and that she rolls and 
pitches. (The sickest passenger on board is the most delighted by 
this circumstance.) Time rushes by as we rush on ; and now we 
see the light in Queenstown Harbour, and now the lights of the 
mail-tender coming out to us. What vagaries the mail-tender per- 
forms on the way, in every point of the compass, especially in those 
where she has no business, and why she performs them, Heaven 
only knows ! At length she is seen plunging within a cable's 
length of our port broadside, and is being roared at through our 
speaking-trumpets to do this thing, and not to do that, and to 
stand by the other, as if she were a very demented tender indeed. 
Then, we slackening amidst a deafening roar of steam, this much- 
abused tender is made fast to us by hawsers, and the men in readi- 
ness carry the bags aboard, and return for more, bending under 
their burdens, and looking just like the pasteboard figures of the 
miller and his men in the theatre of our boyhood, and comporting 
themselves almost as unsteadily. All the while the unfortunate 
tender plunges high and low, and is roared at. Then the Queens- 
town passengers are put on board of her, with infinite plunging 
and roaring, and the tender gets heaved up on the sea to that 
surprising extent that she looks within an ace of washing aboard 
of us, high and dry. Roared at with contumely to the last, this 
wretched tender is at length let go, with a final plunge, of great 
ignominy, and falls spinning into our wake. 

The voice of conscience resumed its dominion as the day climbed 
up the sky, and kept by all of us passengers into port ; kept by us 
as we passed other lighthouses, and dangerous islands off the coast, 
where some of the oflScers, with whom I stood my watch, had gone 
ashore in sailing-ships in fogs (and of which by that token they 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 275 

seemed to have quite an aflfectionate remembrance), and past the 
"Welsh coast, and past the Cheshire coast, and past everything and 
everywhere lying between our ship and her own special dock in 
the Mersey. Off which, at last, at nine of the clock, on a fair 
evening early in May, we stopped, and the voice ceased. A very 
curious sensation, not unlike having my own ears stppped, ensued 
upon that silence ; and it was with a no less curious sensation that 
I went over the side of the good Cunard ship " Russia " (whom pros- 
perity attend through all her voyages !) and surveyed the outer 
hull of the gracious monster that the voice had inhabited. So, 
perhaps, shall we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that 
held the busier voice from which my vagrant fancy derived this 
similitude. 



AH the Year Round, Xeio Series, Vol. 1, JVo. 3, Dec. 19, 1868. 
XXXII. 

A SMALL STAR IN THE EAST. 

I HAD been looking, yesternight, through the famous " Dance of 
Death," and to-day the grim old woodcuts arose in my mind with 
the new significance of a ghastly monotony not to be found in the 
original. The weird skeleton rattled along the streets before me, 
and struck fiercely ; but it was never at the pains of assuming a 
disguise. It played on no dulcimer here, was crowned with no 
flowers, waved no plume, minced in no flowing robe or train, lifted 
no wine-cup, sat at no feast, cast no dice, counted no gold. It was 
simply a bare, gaunt, famished skeleton, slaying his way along. 

The borders of Ratcliff and Stepney, eastward of London, and 
giving on the impure river, were the scene of this uncompromising 
dance of death, upon a drizzling November day. A squalid maze 
of streets, courts, and alleys of miserable houses let out in single 
rooms. A wilderness of dirt, rags, and hunger. A mud-desert, 
chiefly inhabited by a tribe from whom employment has departed, 
or to whom it comes but fitfully and rarely. They are not skilled 
mechanics in any wis*e. They are but labourers, — dock-labourers, 
water-side labourers, coal-porters, ballast-heavers, such like hewers 
of wood and draw^ers of water. But they have come into existence, 
and they propagate their wretched race. 

One grisly joke alone, methought, the skeleton seemed to play 
off here. It had stuck election-bills on the walls, which the wind 
and rain had deteriorated into suitable rags. It had even summed 
up the state of the poll, in chalk, on the shutters of one ruined 



276 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

house. It adjured the free and independent starvers to vote for 
Thisman and vote for Thatman ; not to plump, as they valued the 
state of parties and the national prosperity (both of great impor- 
tance to them, I think) ; but, by returning Thisman and Thatman, 
each naught without the other, to compound a glorious and im- 
mortal whole. Surely the skeleton is nowhere more cruelly ironical 
in the original monkish idea ! 

Pondering in my mind the far-seeing schemes of Thisman and 
Thatman, and of the public blessing called Party, for staying the 
degeneracy, physical and moral, of many thousands (who shall say 
how many ?) of the English race ; for devising employment useful 
to the community for those who want but to work and live ; for 
equalising rates, cultivating waste lands, facilitating emigration, 
and, above all things, saving and utilising the oncoming generations, 
and thereby changing ever-growing national weakness into strength : 
pondering in my mind, I say, these hopeful exertions, I turned 
down a narrow street to look into a house or two. 

It was a dark street with a dead wall on one side. Nearly all 
the outer doors of the houses stood open. I took the first entry, 
and knocked at a parlour-door. Might I come in ? I might, if I 
plased, .sur. 

The woman of the room (Irish) had picked up some long strips 
of wood, about some wharf or barge ; and they had just now been 
thrust into the otherwise empty grate to make two iron pots boil. 
There was some fish in one, and there were some potatoes in the 
other. The flare of the burning wood enabled me to see a table, 
and a broken chair or so, and some old cheap crockery ornaments 
about the chimney-piece. It was not until I had spoken with the 
woman a few minutes, that I saw a horrible brown heap on the 
floor in a corner, which, but for previous experience in this dismal 
wise, I might not have suspected to be "the bed." There was 
something thrown upon it ; and I asked what that was. 

" 'Tis the poor craythur that stays here, sur ; and 'tis very bad 
she is, and 'tis very bad she's been this long time, and 'tis better 
she'll never be, and 'tis slape she does all day, and 'tis wake she 
does all night, and 'tis the lead, sur." 

"The what?" 

"The lead, sur. Sure 'tis the lead-mills, where the women gets 
took on at eighteen-pence a day, sur, when they makes application 
early enough, and is lucky and wanted ; and 'tis lead-pisoned she 
is, sur, and some of them gets lead-pisoned soon, and some of them 
gets lead-pisoned later, and some, but not many, niver : and 'tis all 
according to the constitooshun, sur, and some constitooshuns is 
strong, and some is weak ; and her constitooshun is lead-pisoned, 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TKAVELLER. 277 

bad as can be, sur ; and her brain is coming out at her ear, and it 
hurts her dreadful ; and that's what it is, and niver no more, and 
niver no less, sur." 

The sick young woman moaning here, the speaker bent over her, 
took a bandage from her head, and threw open a back door to let 
in the daylight upon it, from the smallest and most miserable back- 
yard I ever saw. 

"That's what cooms from her, sur, being lead-pisoned ; and it 
cooms from her night and day, the poor, sick craythur ; and the 
pain of it is dreadful ; and God he knows that my husband has 
walked the sthreets these four days, being a labourer, and is walk- 
ing them now, and is ready to work, and no work for him, and no 
fire and no food but the bit in the pot, and no more than ten shill- 
ings in a fortnight ; God be good to us ! and it is poor we are, and 
dark it is and could it is indeed." 

Knowing that I could compensate myself thereafter for my self- 
denial, if I saw fit, I had resolved that I would give nothing in the 
course of these visits. I did this to try the people. I may state 
at once that my closest observation could not detect any indication 
whatever of an expectation that I would give money : they were 
grateful to be talked to about their miserable affairs, and sympathy 
was plainly a comfort to them ; but they neither asked for money 
in any case, nor showed the least trace of surprise or disappoint- 
ment or resentment at my giving none. 

The woman's married daughter had by this time come down from 
her room on the floor above, to join in the conversation. She her- 
self had been to the lead-mills very early that morning to be "took 
on," but had not succeeded. She had four children ; and her hus- 
band, also a water-side labourer, and then out seeking work, seemed 
in no better case as to finding it than her father. She was English, 
and by nature of a buxom figure and cheerful. Both in her poor 
dress and in her mother's there was an effort to keep up some ap- 
pearance of neatness. She knew all about the sufferings of the 
unfortunate invalid, and all about the lead-poisoning, and how the 
symptoms came on, and how they grew, — having often seen them. 
The very smell when you stood inside the door of the works was 
enough to knock you down, she said : yet she was going back again 
to get "took on." What could she do ? Better be ulcerated and 
paralysed for eighteen-pence a day, while it lasted, than see the 
children starve. 

A dark and squalid cupboard in this room, touching the back 
door and all manner of offence, had been for some time the sleep- 
ing place of the sick young woman. But the nights being now 
wintry, and the blankets and coverlets "gone to the leaving shop," 



278 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

she lay all night where she lay all day, and was lying then. The 
woman of the room, her husband, this most miserable patient, and 
two others, lay on the one brown heap together for warmth. 

" God bless you, sir, and thank you ! " were the parting words 
from these people, — gratefully spoken too, — with which I left 
this place. 

Some streets away, I tapped at another parlour-door on another 
ground-floor. Looking in, I found a man, his wife, and four chil- 
dren, sitting at a washing-stool by way of table, at their dinner of 
bread and infused tea-leaves. There was a very scanty cinderous 
fire in the grate by which they sat ; and there was a tent bedstead 
in the room with a bed upon it and a coverlet. The man did not 
rise when I went in, nor during my stay, but civilly inclined his 
head on my pulling off my hat, and, in answer to my inquiry whether 
I might ask him a question or two, said, " Certainly." There being 
a window at each end of this room, back and front, it might have ' 
been ventilated ; but it was shut up tight, to keep the cold out, 
and was very sickening. 

The wife, an intelligent, quick woman, rose and stood at her 
husband's elbow ; and he glanced up at her as if for help. It soon 
appeared that he was rather deaf. He was a slow, simple fellow 
of about thirty. 

" What was he by trade ?" 

" Gentleman asks what are you by trade, John 1 " 

" I am a boilermaker ; " looking about him with an exceedingly 
perplexed air, as if for a boiler that had unaccountably vanished. 

*'He ain't a mechanic, you understand, sir," the wife put in: 
" he's only a labourer." 

" Are you in work ? " 

He looked up at his wife again. " Gentleman says are you in 
work, John?" 

" In work ! " cried this forlorn boilermaker, staring aghast at 
his wife, and then working his vision's way very slowly round to 
me : " Lord, no ! " 

" Ah, he ain't indeed ! " said the poor woman, shaking her head, 
as she looked at the four children in succession, and then at 
him. 

" Work ! " said the boilermaker, still seeking that evaporated 
boiler, first in my countenance, then in the air, and then in the 
features of his second son at his knee : "I wish I was in work ! 
I haven't had more than a day's work to do this three weeks." 

" How have you lived 1 " 

A faint gleam of admiration lighted up the face of the would-be 
boilermaker, as he stretched out the short sleeve of his threadbare 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 279 

canvas jacket, and replied, pointing her out, " On the work of the 
mfe." 

I forget where boilermaking had gone to, or where he supposed 
it had gone to ; but he added some resigned information on that 
head, coupled with an expression of his belief that it was never 
coming back. 

The cheery helpfulness of the wife was very remarkable. She 
did slop-work; made pea-jackets. She produced the pea-jacket 
then in hand, and spread it out upon the bed, — the only piece of 
furniture in the room on which to spread it. She showed how 
much of it she made, and how much was afterwards finished off by 
the machine. According to her calculation at the moment, deduct- 
ing what her trimming cost her, she got for making a pea-jacket 
tenpence half-penny, and she could make one in something less 
than two days. 

But, you see, it come to her through two hands, and of course it 
didn't come through the second hand for nothing. Why did it come 
through the second hand at all ? Why, this way. The second hand 
took the risk of the given-out work, you see. If she had money 
enough to pay the security deposit, — call it two pound, — she could 
get the work from the first hand, and so the second would not have 
to be deducted for. But, having no money at all, the second hand 
come in and took its profit, and so the whole worked down to ten- 
pence half-penny. Having explained all this with great intelligence, 
even with some little pride, and without a whine or murmur, she 
folded her work again, sat down by her husband's side at the wash- 
ing-stool, and resumed her dinner of dry bread. Mean as the meal 
was, on the bare board, with its old gallipots for cups, and what 
not other sordid make-shifts ; shabby as the woman was in dress, 
and toning down towards the Bosjesman colour, with want of nu- 
triment and washing, — there was positively a dignity in her, as 
the family anchor just holding the poor shipwrecked boilermaker's 
bark. When I left the room, the boilermaker's eyes were slowly 
turned towards her, as if his last hope of ever again seeing that 
vanished boiler lay in her direction. 

These people had never applied for parish relief but once ; and 
that was when the husband met with a disabling accident at his 
work. 

Not many doors from here, I went into a room on the first floor. 
The woman apologised for its being in "an untidy mess." The 
day was Saturday, and she was boiling the children's clothes in a 
saucepan on the hearth. There was nothing else into which she 
could have put them. There was no crockery, or tinware, or tub, 
or bucket. There was an old gallipot or two, and there was a 



280 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

broken bottle or so, and there were some broken boxes for seats. 
The last small scraping of coals left was raked together in a corner 
of the floor. There were some rags in an open cupboard, also on 
the floor. In a corner of the room was a crazy old French bed- 
stead, with a man lying on his back upon it in a ragged pilot jacket, 
and rough oil-skin fantail hat. The room was perfectly black. It 
was difficult to believe, at first, that it was not purposely coloured 
black, the walls were so begrimed. 

As I stood opposite the woman boiling the children's clothes, — 
she had not even a piece of soap to wash them with, — and apolo- 
gising for her occupation, I could take in all these things without 
appearing to notice them, and could even correct my inventory. 
I had missed, at the first glance, some half a pound of bread in 
the otherwise empty safe, an old red ragged crinoline hanging on 
the handle of the door by which I had entered, and certain frag- 
ments of rusty iron scattered on the floor, which looked like broken 
tools and a piece of stove-pipe. A child stood looking on. On 
the box nearest to the fire sat two younger children ; one a delicate 
and pretty little creature, whom the other sometimes kissed. 

This woman, like the last, was wofully shabby, and was de- 
generating to the Bosjesman complexion. But her figure, and the 
ghost of a certain vivacity about her, and the spectre of a dimple 
in her cheek, carried my memory strangely back to the old days of 
the Adelphi Theatre, London, when Mrs. Fitzwilliam was the friend 
of Victorine. 

" May I ask you what your husband is 1 " 

"He's a coal-porter, sir," — with a glance and a sigh towards 
the bed. 

"Is he out of work?" 

" Oh, yes, sir ! and work's at all times very, very scanty with 
him ; and now he's laid up." 

"It's my legs," said the man upon the bed. "I'll unroU 'em." 
And immediately began. 

" Have you any older children 1 " 

" I have a daughter that does the needle-work, and I have a son 
that does what he can. She's at her work now, and he's trying for 
work." 

" Do they live here ? " 

" They sleep here. They can't afford to pay more rent, and so 
they come here at night. The rent is very hard upon us. It's 
rose upon us too, now, — sixpence a week, — on account of these 
new changes in the law, about the rates. We are a week behind ; 
the landlord's been shaking and rattling at that door frightfully ; 
he says he'll turn us out. I don't know what's to come of it." 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 281 

The man upon the bed ruefully interposed, "Here's my legs. 
The skin's broke, besides the swelling. I have had a many kicks, 
working, one way and another." 

He looked at his legs (which were much discoloured and mis- 
shapen) for a while, and then appearing to remember that they 
were not popular with his family, rolled them up again, as if they 
were something in the nature of maps or plans that were not wanted 
to be referred to, lay hopelessly down on his back once more with 
his fantail hat over his face, and stirred not. 

" Do your eldest son and daughter sleep in that cupboard ? " 

"Yes," replied the woman. 

"With the children ? " 

"Yes. We have to get together for warmth. We have little 
to cover us." 

" Have you nothing by you to eat but the piece of bread I see 
there?" 

" Nothing. And we had the rest of the loaf for our breakfast, 
with water. I don't know what's to come of it." 

" Have you no prospect of improvement ? " 

"If my eldest son earns anything to-day, he'll bring it home. 
Then we shall have something to eat to-night, and may be able to 
do something towards the rent. If not, I don't know what's to 
come of it." 

" This is a sad state of things." 

" Yes, sir ; it's a hard, hard life. Take care of the stairs as you 
go, sir, — they're broken, — and good day, sir ! " 

These people had a mortal dread of entering the workhouse, and 
received no out-of-door relief. 

In another room, in still another tenement, I found a very decent 
woman with five children, — the last a baby, and she herself a 
patient of the parish doctor, — to whom, her husband being in the 
hospital, the Union allowed for the support of herself and family, 
four shillings a week and five loaves. I suppose when Thisman, 
M.P., and Thatman, M.P., and the Public-blessing Party, lay their 
heads together in course of time, and come to an equalisation of 
rating, she may go down to the dance of death to the tune of 
sixpence more. 

I could enter no other houses for that one while, for I could not 
bear the contemplation of the children. Such heart as I had sum- 
moned to sustain me against the miseries of the adults failed me 
when I looked at the children. I saw how young they were, how 
hungry, how serious and still. I thought of them, sick and dying 
in those lairs. I think of them dead without anguish ; but to 
think of them so suffering and so dying quite unmanned me. 



282 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Down by the river's bank in Ratcliflf, I was turning upward by 
a side-street, therefore, to regain the railway, when my eyes rested 
on the inscription across the road, " East London Children's Hos- 
pital." I could scarcely have seen an inscription better suited to 
my frame of mind ; and I went across and went straight in. 

I found the children's hospital established in an old sail-loft or 
storehouse, of the roughest nature, and on the simplest means. 
There were trap-doors in the floors, where goods had been hoisted 
up and down; heavy feet and heavy weights had started every 
knot in the well-trodden planking : inconvenient bulks and beams 
and awkward staircases perplexed my passage through the wards. 
But I found it airy, sweet, and clean. In its seven and thirty beds 
I saw but little beauty ; for starvation in the second or third gener- 
ation takes a pinched look : but I saw the sufferings both of infancy 
and childhood tenderly assuaged ; I heard the little patients an- 
swering to pet playful names, the light touch of a delicate lady 
laid bare the wasted sticks of arms for me to pity ; and the claw- 
like little hands, as she did so, twined themselves lovingly around 
her wedding-ring. 

One baby mite there was as pretty as any of Raphael's angels. 
The tiny head was bandaged for water on the brain ; and it was 
suffering with acute bronchitis too, and made from time to time a 
plaintive, though not impatient or complaining, little sound. The 
smooth curve of the cheeks and of the chin was faultless in its 
condensation of infantine beauty, and the large bright eyes were 
most lovely. It happened as I stopped at the foot of the bed, 
that these eyes rested upon mine with that wistful expression of 
wondering thoughtfulness which we all know sometimes in very 
little children. They remained fixed on mine, and never turned 
from me while I stood there. When the utterance of that plain- 
tive sound shook the little form, the gaze still remained unchanged. 
I felt as though the child implored me to tell the story of the little 
hospital in which it was sheltered to any gentle heart I could 
address. Laying my world-worn hand upon the little unmarked 
clasped hand at the chin, I gave it a silent promise that I would 
do so. 

A gentleman and lady, a young husband and wife, have bought 
and fitted up this building for its present noble use, and have 
quietly settled themselves in it as its medical officers and directors. 
Both have had considerable practical experience of medicine and 
surgery ; he as house-surgeon of a great London hospital ; she as a 
very earnest student, tested by severe examination, and also as a 
nurse of the sick poor during the prevalence of cholera. 

With every qualification to lure them away, with youth and 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 283 

accomplishments and tastes and habits that can have no response 
in any breast near them, close begirt by every repulsive circumstance 
inseparable from- such a neighbourhood, there they dwell. They 
live in the hospital itself, and their rooms are on its first floor. 
Sitting at their dinner -table, they could hear the cry of one of the 
children in pain. The lady's piano, drawing-materials, books, and 
other such evidences of refinement are as much a part of the rough 
place as the iron bedsteads of the little patients. They are put to 
shifts for room, like passengers on board ship. The dispenser of 
medicines (attracted to them not by self-interest, but by their own 
magnetism and that of their cause) sleeps in a recess in the dining- 
room, and has his washing apparatus in the sideboard. 

Their contented manner of making the best of the things around 
them, I found so pleasantly inseparable from their usefulness ! 
Their pride in this partition that we put up ourselves, or in that 
partition that we took down, or in that other partition that we 
moved, or in the stove that was given us for the waiting-room, or 
in our nightly conversion of the little consulting-room into a smok- 
ing-room ! Their admiration of the situation, if we could only get 
rid of its one objectionable incident, the coal-yard at the back ! 
" Our hospital carriage, presented by a friend, and very useful." 
That was my presentation to a perambulator, for which a coach- 
house had been discovered in a corner down-stairs, just large enough 
to hold it. Coloured prints, in all stages of preparation for being 
added to those already decorating the wards, were plentiful; a 
charming wooden phenomenon of a bird, with an impossible top- 
knot, who ducked his head Avhen you set a counter weight going, 
had been inaugurated as a public statue that very morning ; and 
trotting about among the beds, on familiar terms with all the 
patients, was a comical mongrel dog, called Poodles. This comical 
dog (quite a tonic in himself) was found characteristically starving 
at the door of the institution, and was taken in and fed, and has 
lived here ever since. An admirer of his mental endowments has 
presented him with a collar bearing the legend, " Judge not Poodles 
by external appearances." He was merrily wagging his tail on a 
boy's pillow when he made this modest appeal to me. 

When this hospital was first opened, in January of the present 
year, the people could not possibly conceive but that somebody 
paid for the services rendered there ; and were disposed to claim 
them as a right, and to find fault if out of temper. They soon 
came to understand the case better, and have much increased in 
gratitude. The mothers of the patients avail themselves very 
freely of the visiting rules ; the fathers often on Sundays. There 
is an unreasonable (but still, I think, touching and intelligible) 



284 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

tendency in the parents to take a child away to its wretched home, 
if on the point of death. One boy who had been thus carried off 
on a rainy night, when in a violent state of inflammation, and who 
had been afterwards brought back, had been recovered with exceed- 
ing difficulty; but he was a joUy boy, with a specially strong 
interest in his dinner, when I saw him. 

Insufficient food and unwholesome living are the main causes of 
disease among these small patients. So nourishment, cleanliness, 
and ventilation are the main remedies. Discharged patients are 
looked after, and invited to come and dine now and then ; so are 
certain famishing creatures who were never patients. Both the 
lady and the gentleman are well acquainted, not only with the 
histories of the patients and their families, but with the characters 
and circumstances of great numbers of their neighbours : of these 
they keep a register. It is their common experience, that people, 
sinking down by inches into deeper and deeper poverty, will con- 
ceal it, even from them, if possible, unto the very last extremity. 

The nurses of this hospital are all young, — ranging, say, from 
nineteen to four and twenty. They have even within these narrow 
limits, what many well-endowed hospitals would not give them, a 
comfortable room of their own in which to take their meals. It is 
a beautiful truth, that interest in the children and sympathy with 
their sorrows bind these young women to their places far more 
strongly than any other consideration could. The best skilled of 
the nurses came originally from a kindred neighbourhood, almost 
as poor ; and she knew how much the work was needed. She is a 
fair dressmaker. The hospital cannot pay her as many pounds in 
the year as there are months in it ; and one day the lady regarded 
it as a duty to speak to her about her improving her prospects and 
following her trade. " No," she said : she could never be so useful 
or so happy elsewhere any more ; she must stay among the chil- 
dren. And she stays. One of the nurses, as I passed her, was 
washing a baby-boy. Liking her pleasant face, I stopped to speak 
to her charge, — a common, bullet-headed, frowning charge enough, 
laying hold of his own nose with a slippery grasp, and staring very 
solemnly out of a blanket. The melting of the pleasant face into 
delighted smiles, as this young gentleman gave an unexpected kick, 
and laughed at me, was almost worth my previous pain. 

An affecting play was acted in Paris years ago, called "The 
Children's Doctor." As I parted from my children's doctor, now 
in question, I saw in his easy black necktie, in his loose-buttoned 
black frock-coat, in his pensive face, in the flow of his dark hair, 
in his eyelashes, in the very turn of his moustache, the exact reali- 
sation of the Paris artist's ideal as it was presented on the stage. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 285 

But no romancer that I know of has had the boldness to prefigure 
the life and home of this young husband and young wife in the 
Children's Hospital in the east of London. 

I came away from Ratcliff by the Stepney railway station to the 
terminus at Fenchurch Street. Any one who will reverse that 
route may retrace my steps. 



All the Year Round, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 5, Jan. 2, 1869. 
XXXIII. 

A LITTLE DINNER IN AN HOUR. 

It fell out on a day in this last autumn, that I had to go down 
from London to a place of seaside resort, on an hour's business, 
accompanied by my esteemed friend Bullfinch. Let the place of 
seaside resort be, for the nonce, called Namelesston. 

I had been loitering about Paris in very hot weather, pleasantly 
breakfasting in the open air in the garden of the Palais Royal or 
the Tuileries, pleasantly dining in the open air in the Elysian 
Fields, pleasantly taking my cigar and lemonade in the open air on 
the Italian Boulevard towards the small hours after midnight. 
Bullfinch — an excellent man of business — had summoned me 
back across the Channel, to transact this said hour's business at 
Namelesston ; and thus it feU out that Bullfinch and I were in a 
railway carriage together on our way to Namelesston, each with 
his return-ticket in his waistcoat-pocket. 

Says Bullfinch, " I have a proposal to make. Let us dine at the 
Temeraire." 

I asked Bullfinch, did he recommend the Temeraire? inasmuch 
as I had not been rated on the books of the Temeraire for many 
years. 

Bullfinch declined to accept the responsibility of recommending 
the Temeraire, but on the whole was rather sanguine about it. He 
" seemed to remember," Bullfinch said, that he had dined well there. 
A plain dinner, but good. Certainly not like a Parisian dinner 
(here Bullfinch obviously became the prey of want of confidence), 
but of its kind very fair. 

I appeal to Bullfinch's intimate knowledge of my wants and ways 
to decide whether I was usually ready to be pleased with any 
dinner, or — for the matter of that — with anything that was fair 
of its kind and really what it claimed to be. Bullfinch doing me 
the honour to respond in the affirmative, I agreed to ship myself 
as an able trencherman on board the Temeraire, 



286 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

"Now, our plan shall be this," says Bullfinch, with his forefinger 
at his nose. "As soon as we get to Namelesston. we'll drive 
straight to the Temeraire, and order a little dinner in an hour. 
And as we shall not have more than enough time in which to dis- 
pose of it comfortably, what do you say to giving the house the 
best opportunities of serving it hot and quickly by dining in the 
coffee-room 1 " 

What I had to say was, Certainly. Bullfinch (who is by nature 
of a hopeful constitution) then began to babble of green geese. 
But I checked him in that Falstaffian vein, urging considerations 
of time and cookery. 

In due sequence of events we drove up to the Temeraire, and 
alighted. A youth in livery received us on the door-step. " Looks 
well," said Bullfinch confidentially. And then aloud, "Coffee- 
room ! " 

The youth in livery (now perceived to be mouldy) conducted us 
to the desired haven, and was enjoined by Bullfinch to send the 
waiter at once, as we wished to order a little dinner in an hour. 
Then Bullfinch and I waited for the waiter, until, the waiter con- 
tinuing to wait in some unknown and invisible sphere of action, 
we rang for the waiter; which ring produced the waiter, who an- 
nounced himself as not the waiter who ought to wait upon us, and 
who didn't wait a moment longer. 

So Bullfinch approached the cofi'ee-room door, and melodiously 
pitching his voice into a bar where two young ladies were keeping 
the books of the Temeraire, apologetically explained that we wished 
to order a little dinner in an hour, and that we were debarred from 
the execution of our inoffensive purpose by consignment to solitude. 

Hereupon one of the young ladies rang a bell, which reproduced 
— at the bar this time — the waiter who was not the waiter who 
ought to wait upon us ; that extraordinary man, whose life seemed 
consumed in waiting upon people to say that he wouldn't wait upon 
them, repeated his former protest with great indignation, and 
retired. 

Bullfinch, with a fallen countenance, was about to say to me, 
" This won't do," when the waiter who ought to wait upon us left 
off keeping us waiting at last. " Waiter," said Bullfinch piteously, 
" we have been a long time waiting." The waiter who ought to 
wait upon us laid the blame upon the waiter who ought not to 
wait upon us, and said it was all that waiter's fault. 

"We wish," said Bullfinch, much depressed, "to order a little 
dinner in an hour. What can we have ? " 

" What would you like to have, gentlemen ? " 

Bullfinch, with extreme mournfulness of speech and action, and 



THE XJNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 287 

with a forlorn old fly-blown bill of fare in his hand which the 
waiter had given him, and which was a sort of general manuscript 
index to any cookery-book you please, moved the previous question. 

We could have mock-turtle soup, a sole, curry, and roast duck. 
Agreed. At this table by this window. Punctually in an hour. 

I had been feigning to look out of this window ; but I had been 
taking note of the crumbs on all the tables, the dirty table-cloths, 
the stufiy, soupy, airless atmosphere, the stale leavings everywhere 
about, the deep gloom of the waiter who ought to wait upon us, 
and the stomach-ache with which a lonely traveller at a distant 
table in a corner was too evidently afflicted. I now pointed out to 
Bullfinch the alarming circumstance that this traveller had dined. 
We hurriedly debated whether, without infringement of good breed- 
ing, we could ask him to disclose if he had partaken of mock-turtle, 
sole, curry, or roast duck ? We decided that the thing could not 
be politely done, and we had set our own stomachs on a cast, and 
they must stand the hazard of the die. 

I hold phrenology, within certain limits, to be true ; I am much 
of the same mind as to the subtler expressions of the hand ; I hold 
physiognomy to be infallible; though all these sciences demand 
rare qualities in the student. But I also hold that there is no 
more certain index to personal character than the condition of a 
set of casters is to the character of any hotel. Knowing, and hav- 
ing often tested this theory of mine. Bullfinch resigned himself to 
the worst, when, laying aside any remaining veil of disguise, I held 
up before him in succession the cloudy oil and furry vinegar, the 
clogged cayenne, the dirty salt, the obscene dregs of soy, and the 
anchovy sauce in a flannel waistcoat of decomposition. 

We went out to transact our business. So inspiriting was the 
relief of passing into the clean and windy streets of Namelesston 
from the heavy and vapid closeness of the coffee-room of the Teme- 
raire, that hope began to revive within us. We began to consider 
that perhaps the lonely traveller had taken physic, or done some- 
thing injudicious to bring his complaint on. Bullfinch remarked 
that he thought the waiter who ought to wait upon us had 
brightened a little when suggesting curry ; and although I knew 
him to have been at that moment the express image of despair, I 
allowed myself to become elevated in spirits. As we walked by 
the softly-lapping sea, all the notabilities of Namelesston, who are 
for ever going up and down with the changelessness of the tides, 
passed to and fro in procession. Pretty girls on horseback, and 
with detested riding-masters ; pretty girls on foot ; mature ladies 
in hats, — spectacled, strong-minded, and glaring at the opposite 
or weaker sex. The Stock Exchange was strongly represented. 



288 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Jerusalem was strongly represented, the bores of the prosier London 
clubs were strongly represented. Fortune-hunters of all denomina- 
tions were there, from hirsute insolvency, in a curricle, to closely- 
buttoned swindlery in doubtful boots, on the sharp look-out for any 
likely young gentleman disposed to play a game at billiards routid 
the corner. Masters of languages, their lessons finished for the 
day, were going to their homes out of sight of the sea ; mistresses 
of accomplishments, carrying small portfolios, likewise tripped 
homeward ; pairs of scholastic pupils, two and two, went languidly 
along the beach, surveying the face of the waters as if waiting for 
some Ark to come and take them off. Spectres of the George the 
Fourth days flitted unsteadily among the crowd, bearing the out- 
ward semblance of ancient dandies, of every one of whom it might 
be said, not that he had one leg in the grave, or both legs, but 
that he was steeped in grave to the summit of his high shirt-collar, 
and had nothing real about him but his bones. Alone stationary 
in the midst of all the movements, the Namelesston boatmen leaned 
against the railings and yawned, and looked out to sea, or looked 
at the moored fishing-boats and at nothing. Such is the unchang- 
ing manner of life with this nursery of our hardy seamen ; and 
very dry nurses they are, and always wanting something to drink. 
The only two nautical personages detached from the railing were 
the two fortunate possessors of the celebrated monstrous unknown 
barking-fish, just caught (frequently just caught off Namelesston), 
who carried him about in a hamper, and pressed the scientific to 
look in at the lid. 

The sands of the hour had all run out when we got back to the 
Temeraire. Says Bullfinch, then, to the youth in livery, with bold- 
ness, " Lavatory ! " 

When we arrived at the family vault with a skylight, which the 
youth in livery presented as the institution sought, we had already 
whisked off our cravats and coats ; but finding ourselves in the 
presence of an evil smell, and no linen but two crumpled towels 
newly damp from the countenances of two somebody elses, we put 
on our cravats and coats again, and fled unwashed to the cofi'ee- 
room. 

There the waiter who ought to wait upon us had set forth our 
knives and forks and glasses, on the cloth whose dirty acquaint- 
ance we had already had the pleasure of making, and which we 
were pleased to recognise by the familiar expression of its stains. 
And now there occurred the truly surprising phenomenon, that the 
waiter who ought not to wait upon us swooped down upon us, 
clutched our loaf of bread, and vanished with the same. 

Bullfinch, with distracted eyes, was following this unaccountable 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 289 

figure "out at the portal," like the ghost in Hamlet, when the 
waiter who ought to wait upon us jostled against it, carrjring a 
tureen. 

" Waiter ! " said a severe diner, lately finished, perusing his bill 
fiercely through his eye-glass. 

The waiter put down our tureen on a remote side-table, and 
went to see what was amiss in this new direction. 

" This is not right, you know, waiter. Look here ! here's 
yesterday's sherry, one and eightpence, and here we are again, 
two shillings. And what does sixpence mean?" 

So far from knowing what sixpence meant, the waiter protested 
that he didn't know what anything meant. He wiped the perspira- 
tion from his clammy brow, and said it was impossible to do it, — 
not particularising what, — and the kitchen was so far ofi". 

"Take the bill to the bar, and get it altered," said Mr. Indigna- 
tion Cocker, so to call him. 

The waiter took it, looked intensely at it, didn't seem to like the 
idea of taking it to the bar, and submitted, as a new light upon the 
case, that perhaps sixpence meant sixpence. 

"I tell you again," said Mr. Indignation Cocker, "here's yester- 
day's sherry — can't you see it? — one and eightpence, and here 
we are again, two shillings. What do you make of one and eight- 
pence and two shillings 1 " 

Totally unable to make anything of one and eightpence and two 
shillings, the waiter went out to try if anybody else could ; merely 
casting a helpless backward glance at Bullfinch, in acknowledgment 
of his pathetic entreaties for our soup tureen. After a pause, 
during which Mr. Indignation Cocker read a newspaper and 
coughed defiant coughs, Bullfinch arose to get the tureen, when 
the waiter reappeared and brought it, — dropping Mr. Indigna- 
tion Cocker's altered bill on Mr. Indignation Cocker's table as he 
came along. 

"It's quite impossible to do it, gentlemen," murmured the 
waiter; "and the kitchen is so far off"." 

" Well, you don't keep the house ; it's not your fault, we sup- 
pose. Bring some sherry." 

"Waiter ! " from Mr. Indignation Cocker, with a new and burn- 
ing sense of injury upon him. 

The waiter, arrested on his way to our sherry, stopped short, and 
came back to see what was wrong now. 

"Will you look here? This is worse than before. Do you 
understand? Here's yesterday's sherry, one and eightpence, and 
here we are again two shillings. And what the devil does nine- 
pence mean ? " 



290 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

This new portent utterly confounded the waiter. He wrung his 
napkin, and mutely appealed to the ceiling. 

" Waiter, fetch that sherry," says Bullfinch, in open wrath and 
revolt. 

" I want to know," persisted Mr. Indignation Cocker, " the mean- 
ing of ninepence. I want to know the meaning of sherry one and 
eightpence yesterday, and of here we are again two shillings. Send 
somebody." 

The distracted waiter got out of the room on pretext of sending 
somebody, and by that means got our wine. But the instant he 
appeared with our decanter, Mr. Indignation Cocker descended on 
him again. 

"Waiter!" 

" You will now have the goodness to attend to our dinner, 
waiter," said Bullfinch, sternly. 

" I am very sorry, but it's quite impossible to do it, gentlemen," 
pleaded the waiter ; " and the kitchen " 

" Waiter ! " said Mr. Indignation Cocker. 

" — Is," resumed the waiter, " so far off", that " 

"Waiter !" persisted Mr. Indignation Cocker, "send somebody." 

We were not without our fears that the waiter rushed out to 
hang himself; and we were much relieved by his fetching some- 
body, — in graceful, flowing skirts and with a waist, — who very 
soon settled Mr. Indignation Cocker's business. 

" Oh ! " said Mr. Cocker, with his fire surprisingly quenched by 
this apparition ; "I wished to ask about this bill of mine, because 
it appears to me that there's a little mistake here. Let me show 
you. Here's yesterday's sherry one and eightpence, and here we 
are again two shillings. And how do you explain ninepence 1 " 

However it was explained, in tones too soft to be overheard. 
Mr. Cocker was heard to say nothing more than " Ah-h-h- ! Indeed ; 
thank you ! Yes," and shortly afterwards went out, a milder man. 

The lonely traveller with the stomach-ache had all this time 
suffered severely, drawing up a leg now and then, and sipping hot 
brandy-and-water with grated ginger in it. When we tasted our 
(very) mock-turtle soup, and were instantly seized with symptoms 
of some disorder simulating apoplexy, and occasioned by the sur- 
charge of nose and brain with lukewarm dish-water holding in solu- 
tion sour flour, poisonous condiments, and (say) seventy-five per 
cent, of miscellaneous kitchen stuff" rolled into balls, we were in- 
clined to trace his disorder to that source. On the other hand, 
there was a silent anguish upon him too strongly resembling the 
results established within ourselves by the sherry, to be discarded 
from alarmed consideration. Again, we observed him, with terror, 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 291 

to be much overcome by our sole's being aired in a temporary retreat 
close to liim, while the waiter went out (as we conceived) to see his 
friends. And when the curry made its appearance he suddenly 
retired in great disorder. 

In fine, for the uneatable part of this little dinner (as contradis- 
tinguished from the undrinkable) we paid only seven shillings and 
sixpence each. And Bullfinch and I agreed unanimously, that no 
such ill-served, ill-appointed, ill-cooked, nasty little dinner could be 
got for the money anywhere else under the sun. With that com- 
fort to our backs, we turned them on the dear old Temeraire, the 
charging Temeraire, and resolved (in the Scotch dialect) to gang nae 
mair to the flabby Temeraire. 



All the Year Round, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 7, Jan. 16, 1869. 
XXXIV. 

MR. BARLOW. 

A GREAT reader of good fiction at an unusually early age, it seems 
to me as though I had been born under the superintendence of the 
estimable but terrific gentleman whose name stands at the head of 
my present reflections. The instructive monomaniac, Mr. Barlow, 
will be remembered as the tutor of Master Harry Sandford and 
Master Tommy Merton. He knew everything, and didactically 
improved all sorts of occasions, from the consumption of a plate of 
cherries to the contemplation of a starlight night. What youth 
came to without Mr. Barlow was displayed in the history of Sand- 
ford and Merton, by the example of a certain awful Master Mash. 
This young wretch wore buckles and powder, conducted himself 
with insupportable levity at the theatre, had no idea of facing a 
mad bull single-handed (in which I think him less reprehensible, as 
remotely reflecting my own character), and was a frightful instance 
of the enervating effects of luxury upon the human race. 

Strange destiny on the part of Mr. Barlow, to go down to poster- 
ity as childhood's experience of a bore ! Immortal Mr. Barlow, 
boring his way through the verdant freshness of ages ! 

My personal indictment against Mr. Barlow is one of many counts. 
I will proceed to set forth a few of the injuries he has done me. 

In the first place, he never made or took a joke. This insensi- 
bility on Mr. Barlow's part not only cast its own gloom over my boy- 
hood, but blighted even the sixpenny jest-books of the time ; for, 
groaning under a moral spell constraining me to refer all things to 



292 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Mr. Barlow, I could not choose but ask myself in a whisper when 
tickled by a printed jest, "What would he think of it? What 
would he see in it 1 " The point of the jest immediately became 
a sting, and stung my conscience. For my mind's eye saw him 
stolid, frigid, perchance taking from its shelf some dreary Greek 
book, and translating at full length what some dismal sage said 
(and touched up afterwards, perhaps, for publication), when he 
banished some unlucky joker from Athens. 

The incompatibility of Mr. Barlow with all other portions of my 
young life but himself, the adamantine inadaptability of the man to 
my favourite fancies and amusements, is the thing for which I hate 
him most. What right had he to bore his way into my Arabian 
Nights 1 Yet he did. He was always hinting doubts of the verac- 
ity of Sinbad the Sailor. If he could have got hold of the Wonder- 
ful Lamp, I knew he would have trimmed it and lighted it, and 
delivered a lecture over it on the qualities of sperm-oil, with a glance 
at the whale fisheries. He would so soon have found out — on me- 
chanical principles — the peg in the neck of the Enchanted Horse, 
and would have turned it the right way in so workmanlike a manner, 
that the horse could never have got any height into the air, and the 
story couldn't have been. He would have proved, by map and com- 
pass, that there was no such kingdom as the delightful kingdom of 
Casgar, on the frontiers of Tartary. He would have caused that 
hypocritical young prig Harry to make an experiment, — with the 
aid of a temporary building in the garden and a dummy, — demon- 
strating that you couldn't let a choked hunchback down an Eastern 
chimney with a cord, and leave him upright on the hearth to ter- 
rify the sultan's purveyor. 

The golden sounds of the overture to the first metropolitan pan- 
tomime, I remember, were alloyed by Mr. Barlow. Click click, 
ting ting, bang bang, weedle weedle weedle, bang ! I recall the 
chilling air that ran across my frame and cooled my hot delight, as 
the thought occurred to me, " This would never do for Mr. Barlow ! " 
After the curtain drew up, dreadful doubts of Mr. Barlow's consid- 
ering the costumes of the Nymphs of the Nebula as being sufficiently 
opaque, obtruded themselves on my enjoyment. In the clown I per- 
ceived two persons ; one a fascinating unaccountable creature of a 
hectic complexion, joyous in spirits though feeble in intellect, with 
flashes of brilliancy ; the other a pupil for Mr. Barlow. I thought 
how Mr. Barlow would secretly rise early in the morning, and butter 
the pavement for him, and, when he had brought him down, would 
look severely out of his study window and ask him how he enjoyed 
the fun. 

I thought how Mr. Barlow would heat all the pokers in the house, 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 293 

and singe him ^vith the whole collection, to bring him better ac- 
quainted with the properties of incandescent iron, on which he (Bar- 
low) would fully expatiate. I pictured Mr. Barlow's instituting a 
comparison between the clown's conduct at his studies, — drinking 
up the ink, licking his copy-book, and using his head for blotting- 
paper, — and that of the already mentioned young prig of prigs, 
Harry, sitting at the Barlovian feet, sneakingly pretending to be in 
a rapture of youthful knowledge, I thought how soon Mr. Barlow 
would smooth the clown's hair down, instead of letting it stand erect 
in three tall tufts ; and how, after a couple of years or so with Mr. 
Barlow, he would keep his legs close together when he walked, and 
would take his hands out of his big loose pockets, and wouldn't 
have a jump left in him. 

That I am particularly ignorant what most things in the uni- 
verse are made of, and how they are made, is another of my charges 
against Mr. Barlow. With the dread upon me of developing into 
a Harry, and with a further dread upon me of being Barlowed if I 
made inquiries, by bringing down upon myself a cold shower-bath 
of explanations and "experiments, I forebore enlightenment in my 
youth, and became, as they say in melodramas, " the wreck you now 
behold." That I consorted with idlers and dunces is another of 
the melancholy facts for which I hold Mr. Barlow responsible. 
That pragmatical prig, Harry, became so detestable in my sight, 
that, he being reported studious in the South, I would have fled 
idle to the extremest North. Better to learn misconduct from a 
Master Mash than science and statistics from a Sandford ! So I 
took the path, which, but for Mr. Barlow, I might never have trod- 
den. Thought I, with a shudder, " Mr. Barlow is a bore, with an 
immense constructive power of making bores. His prize specimen 
is a bore. He seeks to make a bore of me. That knowledge is 
power I am not prepared to gainsay ; but, with Mr. Barlow, knowl- 
edge is power to bore." Therefore I took refuge in the caves of 
ignorance, wherein I have resided ever since, and which are still 
my private address. 

But the weightiest charge of all my charges against Mr. Barlow 
is, that he still walks the earth in various disguises, seeking to make 
a Tommy of me, even in my maturity. Irrepressible, instructive 
monomaniac, Mr. Barlow fills my life with pitfalls, and lies hiding 
at the bottom to burst out upon me when I least expect him. 

A few of these dismal experiences of mine shall sufiice. 

Knowing Mr. Barlow to have invested largely in the moving 
panorama trade, and having on various occasions identified him in 
the dark with a long wand in his hand, holding forth in his old way 
(made more appalling in this connection by his sometimes cracking 



294 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

a piece of Mr. Carlyle's own Dead-Sea fruit in mistake for a joke), 
I systematically shun pictorial entertainment on rollers. Similarly, 
I should demand responsible bail and guaranty against the appear- 
ance of Mr. Barlow, before committing myself to attendance at any 
assemblage of my fellow-creatures where a bottle of water and a note- 
book were conspicuous objects ; for in either of those associations, 
I should expressly expect him. But such is the designing nature 
of the man, that he steals in where no reasoning precaution or pre- 
vision could expect him. As in the following case : — 

Adjoining the Caves of Ignorance is a country town. In this 
country town the Mississippi Momuses, nine in number, were an- 
nounced to appear in the town-hall, for the general delectation, this 
last Christm^as week. Knowing Mr. Barlow to be unconnected with 
the Mississippi, though holding republican opinions, and deeming 
myself secure, I took a stall. My object was to hear and see the 
Mississippi Momuses in what the bills described as their " National 
ballads, plantation break-downs, nigger part-songs, choice conun- 
drums, sparkling repartees, &c." I found the nine dressed alike, in 
the black coat and trousers, white waistcoat, very large shirt-front, 
very large shirt-collar, and very large white tie and wristbands, 
which constitute the dress of the mass of the African race, and 
which has been observed by travellers to prevail over a vast num- 
ber of degrees of latitude. All the nine rolled their eyes exceed- 
ingly, and had very red lips. At the extremities of the curve they 
formed, seated in their chairs, were the performers on the tambou- 
rine and bones. The centre Momus, a black of melancholy aspect 
(who inspired me with a vague uneasiness for which I could not 
then account), performed on a Mississippi instrument closely resem- 
bling what was once called in this island a hurdy-gurdy. The 
Momuses on either side of him had each another instrument pecul- 
iar to the Father of Waters, which may be likened to a stringed 
weather-glass held upside down. There were likewise a little flute 
and a vioUn. All went v/ell for a while, and we had had several 
sparkling repartees exchanged between the performers on the tam- 
bourine and bones, when the black of melancholy aspect, turning 
to the latter, and addressing him in a deep and improving voice as 
" Bones, sir," delivered certain grave remarks to him concerning the 
juveniles present, and the season of the year j whereon I perceived 
that I was in the presence of Mr. Barlow — corked ! 

Another night — and this was in London — I attended the rep- 
resentation of a little comedy. As the characters were lifelike 
(and consequently not improving), and as they went upon their 
several ways and designs without personally addressing themselves 
to me, I felt rather confident of coming through it without being 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 295 

regarded as Tommy, the more so, as we were clearly getting close 
to the end. But I deceived myself. All of a sudden, apropos of 
nothing, everybody concerned came to a check and halt, advanced 
to the footlights in a general rally to take dead aim at me, and 
brought me down with a moral homily, in which I detected the 
dread hand of Barlow. 

Nay, so intricate and subtle are the toils of this hunter, that on 
the very next night after that, I was again entrapped, where no 
vestige of a spring could have been apprehended by the timidest. 
It was a burlesque that I saw performed ; an uncompromising bur- 
lesque, where everybody concerned, but especially the ladies, carried 
on at a very considerable rate indeed. Most prominent and active 
among the corps of performers was what I took to be (and she 
really gave me very fair opportunities of coming to a right con- 
clusion) a young lady of a pretty figure. She was dressed as a 
picturesque young gentleman, whose pantaloons had been cut off in 
their infancy ; and she had very neat knees and very neat satin 
boots. Immediately after singing a slang song ancl dancing a slang 
dance, this engaging figure approached the fatal lamps, and, bend- 
ing over them, delivered in a thrilling voice a random eulogium on, 
and exhortation to pursue, the virtues. "Great Heaven!" was 
my exclamation ; " Barlow ! " 

There is still another aspect in which Mr. Barlow perpetually 
insists on my sustaining the character of Tommy, which is more 
unendurable yet, on account of its extreme aggressiveness. For 
the purposes of a review or newspaper, he will get up an abstruse 
subject with infinite pains, will Barlow, utterly regardless of the 
price of midnight oil, and indeed of everything else, save cramming 
himself to the eyes. 

But mark. When Mr. Barlow blows his information off, he is 
not contented with having rammed it home, and discharged it upon 
me. Tommy, his target, but he pretends that he was always in 
possession of it, and made nothing of it, — that he imbibed it with 
mother's milk, — and that I, the wretched Tommy, am most abjectly 
behindhand in not having done the same. I ask, why is Tommy 
to be always the foil of Mr. Barlow to this extent 1 What Mr. 
Barlow had not the slightest notion of himself, a week ago, it surely 
cannot be any very heavy backsliding in me not to have at my fingers' 
ends to-day ! And yet Mr. Barlow systematically carries it over me 
with a high hand, and will tauntingly ask me, in his articles, whether 
it is possible that I am not aware that every school-boy knows that 
the fourteenth turning on the left in the steppes of Russia will con- 
duct to such and such a wandering tribe 1 with other disparaging 
questions of like nature. So, when Mr. Barlow addresses a letter 



296 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

to any journal as a volunteer correspondent (which I frequently 
find him doing), he will previously have gotten somebody to tell him 
some tremendous technicality, and will write in the coolest manner, 
"Now, sir, I may assume that every reader of your columns, pos- 
sessing average information and intelligence, knows as well as I do 
that " — say that the draught from the touch-hole of a cannon of 
such a calibre bears such a proportion in the nicest fractions to the 
draught from the muzzle ; or some equally familiar little fact. But 
whatever it is, be certain that it always tends to the exaltation of 
Mr. Barlow, and the depression of his enforced and enslaved pupil. 
Mr. Barlow's knowledge of my own pursuits I find to be so pro- 
found, that my own knowledge of them becomes as nothing. Mr. 
Barlow (disguised and bearing a feigned name, but detected by me) 
has occasionally taught me, in a sonorous voice, from end to end of 
a long dinner-table, trifles that I took the liberty of teaching him 
five-and-twenty years ago. My closing article of impeachment 
against Mr. Barlow is, that he goes out to breakfast, goes out to 
dinner, goes out everywhere, high and low, and that he will preach 
to me, and that I can't get rid of him. He makes of me a Pro- 
methean Tommy, bound ; and he is the vulture that gorges itself 
upon the liver of my uninstructed mind. 



All the Year Round, Neiv Series, Vol. 1, JSTo. 13, Feb. 27, 1869. 
XXXV. 

ON AN AMATEUR BEAT. 

It is one of my fancies, that even my idlest walk must always 
have its appointed destination. I set myself a task before I leave 
my lodging in Covent-garden on a street expedition, and should 
no more think of altering my route by the way, or turning back 
and leaving a part of it unachieved, than I should think of fraudu- 
lently violating an agreement entered into with somebody else. 
The other day, finding myself under this kind of obligation to 
proceed to Limehouse, I started punctually at noon, in compliance 
with the terms of the contract with myself to which my. good faith 
was pledged. 

On such an occasion, it is my habit to regard my walk as my 
beat, and myself as a higher sort of police-constable doing duty 
on the same. There is many a ruffian in the streets whom I 
mentally collar and clear out of them, who would see mighty little 
of London, I can tell him, if I could deal with him physically. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 297 

Issuing forth upon this very beat, and following with my eyes 
three hulking garroters on their way home, — which home I 
could confidently swear to be within so many yards of Drury 
Lane, in such a narrow and restricted direction (though they live 
in their lodging quite as undisturbed as I in mine), — I went on 
duty with a consideration which I respectfully offer to the new 
Chief Commissioner, — in whom I thoroughly confide as a tried 
and efficient public servant. How often (thought I) have I been 
forced to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable stereotyped pill 
of nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the worthy 
magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did, at that 
present speaking, dwell in a street or court which no man dared 
go down, and how that the worthy magistrate had heard of the 
dark reputation of such street or court, and how that our readers 
would doubtless remember that it was always the same street or 
court which was thus edifyingly discoursed about, say once a fort- 
night. 

Now, suppose that a Chief Commissioner sent round a circular 
to every division of police employed in London, requiring instantly 
the names in all districts of all such much-puffed streets or courts 
which no man durst go down ; and suppose that in such circular 
he gave plain warning, " If those places really exist, they are a 
proof of police inefl&ciency which I mean to punish ; and if they 
do not exist, but are a conventional fiction, then they are a proof 
of lazy tacit police connivance with professional crime, which I 
also mean to punish " — what then 1 Fictions or realities, could 
they survive the touchstone of this atom of common sense ? To 
tell us in open court, until it has become as trite a feature of news 
as the great gooseberry, that a costly police-system such as was 
never before heard of, has left in London, in the days of steam 
and gas and photographs of thieves and electric telegraphs, the 
sanctuaries and stews of the Stuarts ! Why, a parity of practice, 
in all departments, would bring back the Plague in two summers, 
and the Druids in a century ! 

Walking faster under my share of this public injury, I overturned 
a wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of 
trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the other, 
pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to raise 
and succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it, but of both 
sexes, were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling, fighting, 
clamouring, yelling, shivering in their nakedness and hunger. The 
piece of money I had put into the claw of the child I had over- 
turned was clawed out of it, and was again clawed out of that 
wolfish gripe, and again out of that, and soon I had no notion in 



298 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

what part of the obscene scuffle in the mud, of rags and legs and 
arms and dirt, the money might be. In raising the child, I had 
drawn it aside out of the main thoroughfare, and this took place 
among some wooden hoardings and barriers and ruins of demolished 
buildings, hard by Temple Bar. 

Unexpectedly, from among them emerged a genuine police con- 
stable, before whom the dreadful brood dispersed in various direc- 
tions, he making feints and darts in this direction and in that, and 
catching nothing. When all were frightened away, he took off his 
hat, pulled out a handkerchief from it, wiped his heated brow, and 
restored the handkerchief and hat to their places, with the air of 
a man who had discharged a great moral duty, — as indeed he had, 
in doing what was set down for him. I looked at him, and I 
looked about at the disorderly traces in the mud, and I thought of 
the drops of rain and the footprints of an extinct creature, hoary 
ages upon ages old, that geologists have identified on the face of a 
clift ; and this speculation came over me : If this mud could pet- 
rify at this moment, and could lie concealed here for ten thousand 
years, I wonder whether the race of men then to be our successors 
on the earth could, from these or any marks, by the utmost force 
of the human intellect, unassisted by tradition, deduce such an 
astounding inference as the existence of a polished state of society 
that bore with the public savagery of neglected children in the 
streets of its capital city, and was proud of its power by sea and 
land, and never used its power to seize and save them ! 

After this, when I came to the Old Bailey and glanced up it 
towards Newgate, I found that the prison had an inconsistent 
look. There seemed to be some unlucky inconsistency in the 
atmosphere that day; for though the proportions of St. Paul's 
Cathedral are very beautiful, it had an air of being somewhat out 
of drawing, in my eyes. I felt as though the cross were too high 
up, and perched upon the intervening golden ball too far away. 

Facing eastward, I left behind me Smithfield and Old Bailey, — 
fire and fagot, condemned hold, public hanging, whipping through 
the city at the cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful 
ancestral landmarks, which rude hands have rooted up, without 
bringing the stars quite down upon us as yet, — and went my way 
upon my beat, noting how oddly characteristic neighbourhoods are 
divided from one another, hereabout, as though by an invisible line 
across the way. Here shall cease the bankers and the money- 
changers ; here shall begin the shipping interest and the nautical- 
instrument shops ; here shall follow a scarcely perceptible flavour- 
ing of groceries and drugs ; here shall come a strong infusion of 
butchers ; now, small hosiers shall be in the ascendant ; henceforth, 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 299 

everything exposed for sale shall have its ticketed price attached. 
All this as if specially ordered and appointed. 

A single stride at Houndsditch Church, no wider than sufficed 
to cross the kennel at the bottom of the Canon-gate, which the 
debtors in Holyrood sanctuary were wont to relieve their minds by 
skipping over, as Scott relates, and standing in delightful daring 
of catchpoles on the free side, — a single stride, and everything is 
entirely changed in grain and character. West of the stride, a 
table, or a chest of drawers on sale, shall be of mahogany and 
French-polished; east of the stride, it shall be of deal, smeared 
with a cheap counterfeit resembling lip-salve. West of the stride, 
a penny loaf or bun shall be compact and self-contained ; east of 
the stride, it shall be of a sprawling and splay-footed character, as 
seeking to make more of itself for the money. My beat lying 
round by Whitechapel Church, and the adjacent sugar-refineries, — 
great buildings, tier upon tier, that have the appearance of being 
nearly related to the dock-warehouses at Liverpool, — I turned off 
to my right, and, passing round the awkward corner on my left, 
came suddenly on an apparition familiar to London streets afar off. 

What London peripatetic of these times has not seen the woman 
who has fallen forward, double, through some affection of the spine, 
and whose head has of late taken a turn to one side, so that it now 
droops over the back of one of her arms at about the wrist ? Who 
does not know her staff, and her shawl, and her basket, as she 
gropes her way along, capable of seeing nothing but the pavement, 
never begging, never stopping, for ever going somewhere on no 
business? How does she live, whence does she come, whither 
does she go, and why 1 I mind the time when her yellow arms 
were naught but bone and parchment. Slight changes steal over 
her; for there is a shadowy suggestion of human skin on them 
now. The Strand may be taken as the central point about which 
she revolves in a half-mile orbit. How comes she so far east as 
this ? And coming back too ! Having been how much farther 1 
She is a rare spectacle in this neighbourhood. I receive intelligent 
information to this effect from a dog — a lop-sided mongrel with a 
foolish tail, plodding along with his tail up, and his ears pricked, 
and displaying an amiable interest in the ways of his fellow-men, 
— if I may be allowed the expression. After pausing at a pork-shop, 
he is jogging eastward like myself, with a benevolent countenance and 
a watery mouth, as though musing on the many excellences of pork, 
when he beholds this doubled-up bundle approaching. He is not so 
much astonished at the bundle (though amazed by that), as the circum- 
stance that it has within itself the means of locomotion. He stops, 
pricks his ears higher, makes a slight point, stares, utters a short, low 



300 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

growl, and glistens at the nose, — as I conceive with terror. The 
bundle continuing to approach, he barks, turns tail, and is about 
to fly, when, arguing Avith himself that flight is not becoming in a 
dog, he turns, and once more faces the advancing heap of clothes. 
After much hesitation, it occurs to him that there may be a face in 
it somewhere. Desperately resolving to undertake the adventure, 
and pursue the inquiry, he goes slowly up to the bundle, goes slowly 
round it, and coming at length upon the human countenance down 
there wliere never human countenance should be, gives a yelp of 
horror, and flies for the East India Docks. 

Being now in the Commercial Eoad district of my beat, and 
bethinking myself that Stepney Station is near, I quicken my pace 
that I may turn out of the road at that point, and see how my 
small eastern star is shining. 

The Children's Hospital, to which I gave that name, is in full force. 
All its beds are occupied. There is a new face on the bed where my 
pretty baby lay, and that sweet little child is now at rest for ever. 
Much kind sympathy has been here since my former visit, and it is 
good to see the walls profusely garnished with dolls. I wonder what 
Poodles may think of them, as they stretch out their arms above the 
beds, and stare, and display their splendid dresses. Poodles has a 
greater interest in tlie patients. I find him making the round of the 
beds, like a house-surgeon, attended by another dog, — a friend, — 
who appears to trot about with him in the character of his pupil 
dresser. Poodles is anxious to make me known to a pretty little 
girl looking wonderfully healthy, who had had a leg taken off for 
cancer of the knee. A difficult operation. Poodles intimates, wag- 
ging his tail on the counterpane, but perfectly successful, as you 
see, dear sir ! The patient, patting Poodles, adds with a smile, 
" The leg was so much trouble to me, that I am glad it's gone." 
I never saw anything in doggery finer than the deportment of 
Poodles, w^hen another little girl opens her mouth to show a pecul- 
iar enlargement of the tongue. Poodles (at that time on a table, 
to be on a level with the occasion) looks at the tongue (with his 
own sympathetically out) so ver}^ gravely and knowingly, that I 
feel inclined to put my hand in my waistcoat-pocket, and give him 
a guinea, wrapped in paper. 

On my beat again, and close to Limehouse Church, its termina- 
tion, I found myself near to certain "Lead-Mills." Struck by the 
name, which was fresh in my memory, and finding on inquiry, that 
these same lead-mills were identified with those same lead-mills of 
which I made mention when I first visited the East London Chil- 
dren's Hospital and its neighbourhood as Uncommercial Traveller, 
I resolved to have a look at them. 




POODLES GOING THE ROUND. 



302 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

Received by two very intelligent gentlemen, brothers, and part- 
ners with their father in the concern, and who testified every desire 
to show their works to me freely, I went over the lead-mills. The 
purport of such works is the conversion of pig-lead into white-lead. 
This conversion is brought about by the slow and gradual effecting 
of certain successive chemical changes in the lead itself The proc- 
esses are picturesque and interesting, — the most so, being the bury- 
ing of the lead, at a certain stage of preparation, in pots, each pot 
containing a certain quantity of acid besides, and all the pots being 
buried in vast numbers, in layers, under tan, for some ten weeks. 

Hopping up ladders, and across planks, and on elevated perches, 
until I was uncertain whether to liken myself to a bird or a brick- 
layer, I became conscious of standing on nothing particular, looking 
down into one of a series of large cocklofts, with the outer day 
peeping in through the chinks in the tiled roof above. A number 
of women were ascending to, and descending from, this cockloft, 
each carrying on the upward journey a pot of prepared lead and 
acid, for deposition under the smoking tan. When one layer of 
pots was completely filled, it was carefully covered in with planks, 
and those were carefully covered with tan again, and then another 
layer of pots was begun above ; sufiicient means of ventilation being 
preserved through wooden tubes. Going down into the cockloft 
then filling, I found the heat of the tan to be surprisingly great, 
and also the odour of the lead and acid to be not absolutely exqui- 
site, though I believe not noxious at that stage. In other cock- 
lofts, where the pots were being exhumed, the heat of the steaming 
tan was much greater, and the smell was penetrating and peculiar. 
There were cocklofts in all stages ; full and empty, half filled and 
half emptied ; strong, active women were clambering about them 
busily ; and the whole thing had rather the air of the upper part 
of the house of some immensely rich old Turk, whose faithful 
seraglio were hiding his money because the sultan or the pasha 
was coming. 

As is the case with most pulps or pigments, so in the instance of 
this white-lead, processes of stirring, separating, washing, grinding, 
rolling, and pressing succeed. Some of these are unquestionably 
inimical to health, the danger arising from inhalation of particles 
of lead, or from contact between the lead and the touch, or both. 
Against these dangers, I found good respirators provided (simply 
made of flafmel and muslin, so as to be inexpensively renewed, and 
in some instances washed with scented soap), and gauntlet gloves, 
and loose gowns. Everywhere, there was as much fresh air as win- 
dows, well placed and opened, could possibly admit. And it was 
explained that the precaution of frequently changing the women 



TPIE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 303 

employed in the worst parts of the work (a precaution originating 
in their own experience or apprehension of its ill effects) was found 
salutary. Tliey had a mysterious and singular appearance, with 
the mouth and nose covered, and the loose gown on, and yet bore 
out the simile of the old Turk and the seraglio all the better for 
the disguise. 

At last this vexed white-lead, having been buried and resusci- 
tated, and heated and cooled and stirred, and separated and washed 
and ground, and rolled and pressed, is subjected to the action of 
intense fiery heat. A row of women, dressed as above described, 
stood, let us say, in a large stone bakehouse, passing on the bak- 
ing-dishes as they were given out by the cooks, from hand to 
hand, into the ovens. The oven, or stove, cold as yet, looked as 
high as an ordinary house, and was full of men and women on 
temporary footholds, briskly passing up and stowing away the 
dishes. The door of another oven, or stove, about to be cooled 
and emptied, was opened from above, for the uncommercial coun- 
tenance to peer down into. The uncommercial countenance with- 
drew itself, with expedition and a sense of suffocation, from the 
dull-glowing heat and the overpowering smell. On the whole, per- 
haps the going into these stoves to work, when they are freshly 
opened, may be the worst part of the occupation. 

But I made it out to be indubitable that the owners of these 
lead-mills honestly and sedulously try to reduce the dangers of the 
occupation to the lowest point. 

A washing-place is provided for the women (I thought there 
might have been more towels), and a room in which they hang their 
clothes, and take their meals, and where they have a good fire-range 
and fire, and a female attendant to help them, and to watch that 
they do not neglect the cleansing of their hands before touching 
their food. An experienced medical attendant is provided for them, 
and any premonitory symptoms of lead-poisoning are carefully 
treated. Their teapots and such things were set out on tables 
ready for their afternoon meal, when I saw their room ; and it had 
a homely look. It is found that they bear the work much better 
than men : some few of them have been at it for years, and the 
great majority of those I observed were strong and active. On the 
other hand, it should be remembered that most of them are very 
capricious and irregular in their attendance. 

American inventiveness would seem to indicate that before very 
long white-lead may be made entirely by machinery. The sooner, 
the better. In the meantime, I parted from my two frank conduc- 
tors over the mills, by telling them that they had nothing there to 
be concealed, and nothing to be blamed for. As to the rest, the 



304 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

philosophy of the matter of lead-poisoning and workpeople seems 
to me to have been pretty fairly summed up by the Irishwoman 
whom I quoted in my former paper: "Some of them gets lead- 
pisoned soon, and some of them gets lead-pisoned later, and some, 
but not many, niver ; and 'tis all according to the constitooshun, 
sur ; and some constitooshuns is strong and some is weak." 
Retracing my footsteps over my beat, I went off duty. 



All the Year Round, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 25, May 22, 1869. 
XXXVI. 

A FLY-LEAF IN A LIFE. 

Once upon a time (no matter when), I was engaged in a pursuit 
(no matter what), which could be transacted by myself alone ; in 
which I could have no help ; which imposed a constant strain on 
the attention, memory, observation, and physical powers; and which 
involved an almost fabulous amount of change of place and rapid 
railway travelling. I had followed this pursuit through an excep- 
tionally trying winter in an always trying climate, and had resumed 
it in England after but a brief repose. Thus it came to be pro- 
longed until, at length — and, as it seemed, all of a sudden — it so 
wore me out that I could not rely, with my usual cheerful confi- 
dence, upon myself to achieve the constantly recuning task, and 
began to feel (for the first time in my life) giddy, jarred, shaken, 
faint, uncertain of voice and sight and tread and touch, and dull of 
spirit. The medical advice I sought within a few hours, was given 
in two words : " Instant rest." Being accustomed to observe my- 
self as curiously as if I were another man, and knowing the advice 
to meet my only need, I instantly halted in the pursuit of which I 
speak, and rested. 

My intention was, to interpose, as it were, a fly-leaf in the book 
of my life, in which nothing should be written from without for a 
brief season of a few weeks. But some very singular experiences 
recorded themselves on this same fly-leaf, and I am going to relate 
them literally, I repeat the word : literally : 

My first odd experience was of the remarkable coincidence be- 
tween my case, in the general mind, and one Mr. Merdle's as I find 
it recorded in a work of fiction called Little Dorrit. To be sure, 
Mr. Merdle was a swindler, forger, and thief, and my calling had 
been of a less harmful (and less remunerative) nature ; but it was 
all one for that. 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 305 

Here is Mr. Merdle's case : 

" At first, he was dead of all the diseases that ever were known, 
and of several bran-new maladies invented with the speed of Light 
to meet the demand of the occasion. He had concealed a dropsy 
from infancy, he had inherited a large estate of water on the chest 
from his grandfather, he had had an operation performed upon him 
every morning of his life for eighteen years, he had been subject to 
the explosion of important veins in his body after the manner of 
fireworks, he had had something the matter with his lungs, he had 
had something the matter with his heart, he had had something 
the matter with his brain. Five hundred people who sat down to 
breakfast entirely uninformed on the whole subject, believed before 
they had done breakfast, that they privately and personally knew 
Physician to have said to Mr. Merdle, ' You must expect to go out, 
some day, like the snufi" of a candle;' and that they knew Mr. 
Merdle to have said to Physician, ' A man can die but once.' By 
about eleven o'clock in the forenoon, something the matter with the 
brain, became the favourite theory against the field ; and by twelve 
the something had been distinctly ascertained to be ' Pressure.' 

" Pressure was so entirely satisfactory to the public mind, and 
seemed to make every one so comfortable, that it might have lasted 
all day but for Bar's having taken the real state of the case into 
Court at half-past nine. Pressure, however, so far from being over- 
thrown by the discovery, became a greater favourite than ever. 
There was a general moralising upon Pressure, in every street. All 
the people who had tried to make money and had not been able to 
do it, said. There you were ! You no sooner began to devote your- 
self to the pursuit of wealth, than you got Pressure. The idle 
people improved the occasion in a similar manner. See, said they, 
what you brought yourself to by work, work, work ! You persisted 
in working, you overdid it. Pressure came on, and you were done 
for ! This consideration was very potent in many quarters, but 
nowhere more so than among the young clerks and partners who 
had never been in the slightest danger of overdoing it. These, one 
and all declared, quite piously, that they hoped they would never 
forget the warning as long as they lived, and that their conduct 
might be so regulated as to keep off Pressure, and preserve them, 
a comfort to their friends, for many years." 

Just my case — if I had only known it — when I was quietly 
basking in the sunshine in my Kentish meadow ! 

But while I so rested, thankfully recovering every hour, I had 
experiences more odd than this. I had experiences of spiritual con- 
ceit, for which, as giving me a new warning against that curse of 
mankind, I shall always feel grateful to the supposition that I was 



306 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

too far gone to protest against playing sick lion to any stray don- 
key with an itching hoof. All sorts of people seemed to become 
vicariously religious at my expense. I received the most uncom- 
promising warning that I was a Heathen ; on the conclusive author- 
ity of a field preacher, who, like the most of his ignorant and vain 
and daring class, could not construct a tolerable sentence in his 
native tongue or pen a fair letter. This inspired individual called 
me to order roundly, and knew in the freest and easiest way where 
I was going to, and what would become of me if I failed to fashion 
myself on his bright example, and was on terms of blasphemous 
confidence with the Heavenly Host. He was in the secrets of my 
heart, and in the lowest soundings of my soul — he ! — and could 
read the depths of my nature better than his A.B.C., and could 
turn me inside out, like his own clammy glove. But what is far 
more extraordinary than this — for such dirty water as this could 
alone be drawn from such a shallow and muddy source — I found 
from the information of a beneficed clergyman, of whom I never 
heard and whom I never saw, that I had not, as I rather supposed 
I had, lived a life of some reading, contemplation, and inquiry j 
that I had not studied, as I rather supposed I had, to inculcate 
some Christian lessons in books ; that I had never tried, as I rather 
supposed I had, to turn a child or two tenderly towards the knowl- 
edge and love of our Saviour ; that I had never had, as I rather 
supposed I had had, departed friends, or stood beside open graves ; 
but that I had lived a life of "uninterrupted prosperity," and that 
I needed this "check, overmuch," and that the way to turn it to 
account was to read these sermons and these poems, enclosed, and 
written and issued by my correspondent ! I beg it may be under- 
stood that I relate facts of my own uncommercial experience, and 
no vain imaginings. The documents in proof lie near my hand. 

Another odd entiy on the fly-leaf, of a more entertaining char- 
acter, was the wonderful persistency with which kind sympathisers 
assumed that I had injuriously coupled with the so suddenly relin- 
quished pursuit, those personal habits of mine most obviously in- 
compatible with it, and most plainly impossible of being maintained, 
along with it. As, all that exercise, all that cold bathing, all that 
wind and weather, all that uphill training — all that everything 
else, say, which is usually carried about by express trains in a 
portmanteau and hat-box, and partaken of under a flaming row of 
gaslights in the company of two thousand people. This assuming 
of a whole case against all fact and likelihood, struck me as partic- 
ularly droll, and was an oddity of which I certainly had had no 
adequate experience in life until I turned that curious fly-leaf. 

My old acquaintances the begging-letter writers came out on the 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 307 

fly-leaf, very piously indeed. They were glad, at such a serious 
crisis, to aftbrd me another opportunity of sending that Post-office 
order. I needn't make it a pound, as previously insisted on ; ten 
shillings might ease my mind, And Heaven forbid that they should 
refuse, at such an insignificant figure, to take a weight off the 
memory of an erring fellow-creature ! One gentleman, of an ar- 
tistic turn (and copiously illustrating the books of the Mendicity 
Society) thought it might soothe my conscience in the tender respect 
of gifts misused, if I would immediately cash up in aid of his lowly 
talent for original design — as a specimen of which he enclosed me 
a work of art which I recognised as a tracing from a woodcut orig- 
inally published in the late Mrs. TroUope's book on America, forty 
or fifty years ago. The number of people who were prepared to 
live long years after me, untiring benefactors to their species, for 
fifty pounds apiece down, was astonishing. Also, of those who 
wanted bank notes for stiff penitential amounts, to give away — 
not to keep, on any account. 

Divers wonderful medicines and machines insinuated recommen- 
dations of themselves into the fly-leaf that was to have been so 
blank. It was specially observable that every prescriber, whether 
in a moral or physical direction, knew me thoroughly — knew me 
from head to heel, in and out, through and through, upside down. 
I was a glass piece of general property, and everybody was on the 
most surprisingly intimate terms with me. A few public institu- 
tions had complimentary perceptions of corners in my mind, of 
which, after considerable self-examination, I have not discovered 
any indication. Neat little printed forms were addressed to those 
corners, beginning with the words " I give and bequeath." 

Will it seem exaggerative to state my belief that the most 
honest, the most modest, and the least vain-glorious of all the 
records upon this strange fly-leaf, was a letter from the self-deceived 
discoverer of the recondite secret? "How to live four or five 
hundred years." Doubtless it wiU seem so, yet the statement is 
not exaggerative by any means, but is made in my serious and 
sincere conviction. With this, and with a laugh at the rest that 
shall not be cynical, I turn the Fly-leaf, and go on again. 



308 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

All the Year Bound, New Series, Vol. 2, No. 27, June 5, 1869. 
XXXVII. 

A PLEA FOE TOTAL ABSTINENCE. 

One day this last Whitsuntide, at precisely eleven o'clock in the 
forenoon, there suddenly rode into the field of view commanded by 
the windows of my lodging an equestrian phenomenon. It was a 
fellow-creature on horseback, dressed in the absurdest manner. 
The fellow-creature wore high boots; some other (and much larger) 
fellow-creature's breeches, of a slack-baked doughy colour and a 
baggy form ; a blue shirt, whereof the skirt, or tail, was puffily 
tucked into the waist-band of the said breeches ; no coat ; a red 
shoulder-belt ; and a demi-semi-military scarlet hat, with a feathered 
ornament in front, which, to the uninstructed human vision, had 
the appearance of a moulting shuttlecock. I laid down the news- 
paper with which I had been occupied, and surveyed the fellow-man 
in question with astonishment. Whether he had been sitting to 
any painter as a frontispiece for a new edition of " Sartor Resartus ; " 
whether "the husk or shell of him," as the esteemed Herr Teufels- 
droch might put it, were founded on a jockey, on a circus, on Gen- 
eral Garibaldi, on cheap porcelain, on a toy shop, on Guy Fawkes, 
on waxwork, on gold-digging, on Bedlam, or on all, — were doubts 
that greatly exercised my mind. Meanwhile, my fellow-man stum- 
bled and slided, excessively against his will, on the slippery stones 
of my Coven t- garden street, and elicited shrieks from several sym- 
pathetic females, by convulsively restraining himself from pitching 
over his horse's head. In the very crisis of these evolutions, and 
indeed at the trying moment when his charger's tail was in a tobac- 
conist's shop, and his head anywhere about town, this cavalier was 
joined by two similar portents, who, likewise stumbling and sliding, 
caused him to stumble and slide the more distressingly. At length 
this Gilpinian triumvirate effected a halt, and, looking northward, 
waved their three right hands as commanding unseen troops, to 
" Up, guards ! and at 'em." Hereupon a brazen band burst forth, 
which caused them to be instantly bolted with to some remote spot 
of earth in the direction of the Surrey Hills. 

Judging from these appearances that a procession was under way, 
I threw up my window, and, craning out, had the satisfaction of 
beholding it advancing along the streets. It was a Teetotal pro- 
cession, as I learnt from its banners, and was long enough to con- 
sume twenty minutes in passing. There were a great number of 
children in it, some of them so very young in their mothers' arms 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 309 

as to be in the act of practically exemplifying their abstinence from 
fermented liquors, and attachment to an unintoxicatiug drink, while 
the procession defiled. The display was, on the whole, pleasant to 
see, as any good-humoured holiday assemblage of clean, cheerful, 
and well-conducted people should be. It was bright with ribbons, 
tinsel, and shoulder-belts, and abounded in flowers, as if those latter 
trophies had come up in profusion under much watering. The day 
being breezy, the insubordination of the large banners was very rep- 
rehensible. Each of these being borne aloft on two poles and stayed 
with some half-dozen lines, was carried, as polite books in the last 
century used to be written, by "various hands," and the anxiety 
expressed in the upturned faces of those officers, — something 
between the anxiety attendant on the balancing art, and that insepa- 
rable from the pastime of kite-flying, with a toucli of the angler's 
quality in landing his scaly prey, — much impressed me. Suddenly, 
too, a banner would shiver in the wind, and go about in the most 
inconvenient manner. This always happened oftenest with such 
gorgeous standards as those representing a gentleman in black, cor- 
pulent with tea and water, in the laudable act of summarily reform- 
ing a family, feeble and pinched with beer. The gentleman in black 
distended by wind would then conduct himself mth the most un- 
becoming levity, while the beery family, growing beerier, would 
frantically try to tear themselves away from his ministration. 
Some of the inscriptions accompanying the banners were of a 
highly determined character, as "We never, never will give up 
the temperance cause," with similar sound resolutions rather sug- 
gestive to the profane mind of Mrs. Micawber's " I never will desert 
Mr. Micawber," and of Mr. Micawber's retort, "Really, my dear, 
I am not aware that you were ever required by any human being 
to do anything of the sort." 

At intervals, a gloom would fall on the passing members of the 
procession, for which I was at first unable to account. But this I 
discovered, after a little observation, to be occasioned by the com- 
ing on of the executioners, — the terrible official beings who were 
to make the speeches by-and-bye, — who were distributed in open 
carriages at various points of the cavalcade. A dark cloud and a 
sensation of dampness, as from many wet blankets, invariably pre- 
ceded the rolling on of the dreadful cars containing these headsmen ; 
and I noticed that the wretched people who closely followed them, 
and who were in a manner forced to contemplate their folded arms, 
complacent countenances, and threatening lips, were more over- 
shadowed by the cloud and damp than those in front. Indeed, I 
perceived in some of these so moody an implacability towards the 
magnates of the scaffold, and so plain a desire to tear them limb 



310 THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 

from limb, that I would respectfully suggest to the managers the 
expediency of conveying the executioners to the scene of their 
dismal labours by unfrequented ways, and in closely-tilted carts 
next Whitsuntide. 

The procession was composed of a series of smaller processions, 
which had come together, each from its own metropolitan district. 
An infusion of allegory became perceptible when patriotic Peckham 
advanced. So I judged, from the circumstance of Peckham 's un- 
furling a silken banner that fanned heaven and earth with the 
words, "The Peckham Lifeboat." No boat being in attendance, 
though life, in the likeness of "a gallant, gallant crew," in nautical 
uniform, followed the flag, I was led to meditate on the fact that 
Peckham is described by geographers as an inland settlement, with 
no larger or nearer shore-line than the towing-path of the Surrey 
Canal, on which stormy station I had been given to understand no 
lifeboat exists. Thus I deduced an allegorical meaning, and came 
to the conclusion, that if patriotic Peckham picked a peck of pickled 
poetry, this ivas the peck of pickled poetry which patriotic Peckham 
picked. 

I have observed that the aggregate procession was on the whole 
pleasant to see. I made use of that qualified expression with a 
direct meaning, which I will now explain. It involves the title of 
this paper, and a little fair trying of teetotalism by its own tests. 
There were many people on foot, and many people in vehicles of 
various kinds. The former were pleasant to see, and the latter 
were not pleasant to see ; for the reason that I never, on any occa- 
sion or under any circumstances, have beheld heavier overloading 
of horses than in this public show. Unless the imposition of a 
great van laden with from ten to twenty people on a single horse 
be a moderate tasking of the poor creature, then the temperate 
use of horses was immoderate and cruel. From the smallest and 
lightest horse to the largest and heaviest, there were many instances 
in which the beast of burden was so shamefully overladen, that the 
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have frequently 
interposed in less gross cases. 

Now, I have always held that there may be, and that there un- 
questionably is, such a thing as use without abuse, and that there- 
fore the total abolitionists are irrational and wrong-headed. But 
the procession completely converted me. For so large a number of 
the people using draught-horses in it were so clearly unable to use 
them without abusing them, that I perceived total abstinence from 
horse-flesh to be the only remedy of which the case admitted. As 
it is all one to teetotalers whether you take half a pint of beer or 
half a gallon, so it was all one here whether the beast of burden 



THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER. 311 

were a pony or a cart-horse. Indeed, my case had the special 
strength that the half-pint quadruped underwent as much suffering 
as the half-gallon quadruped. Moral : total abstinence from horse- 
flesh through the whole length and breadth of the scale. This 
pledge will be in course of administration to all teetotal procession- 
ists, not pedestrians, at the publishing office of "All the Year 
Round," on the 1st day of April, 1870. 

Observe a point for consideration. This procession comprised 
many persons in their gigs, broughams, tax-carts, barouches, chaises, 
and what not, who were merciful to the dumb beasts that drew 
them, and did not overcharge their strength. What is to be done 
with those unoffending persons 1 I will not run amuck and vilify 
and defame them, as teetotal tracts and platforms would most 
assuredly do, if the question were one of drinking instead of driv- 
ing : I merely ask what is to be done with them ! The reply 
admits of no dispute whatever. Manifestly, in strict accordance 
with teetotal doctrines, they must come in too, and take the total 
abstinence from horseflesh pledge. It is not pretended that those 
members of the procession misused certain auxiliaries which in 
most countries and all ages have been bestowed upon man for his 
use, but it is undeniable that other members of the procession did. 
Teetotal mathematics demonstrate that the less includes the greater ; 
that the guilty include the innocent, the blind the seeing, the deaf 
the hearing, the dumb the speaking, the drunken the sober. If 
any of the moderate users of draught-cattle in question should deem 
that there is any gentle violence done to their reason by these 
elements of logic, they are invited to come out of the procession 
next Whitsuntide, and look at it from my window. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 



FRONTISPIECE TO VOLS. I.-II., FIRST EDITION, 1853. 




FRONTISPIECE TO VOL. III., FIRST EDITION, 1853. 





ALFKKD IN THE NEATHERD's COTTAGE. 



A CHILD'S 



HISTORY OF ENGLAND 



CHARLES DICKENS 



WITH EIGHT ILLUSTBATIOXS BY MARCUS STOXE 



NehJ g0rft 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 

LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1896 

All rights reserved 



TABLE OF THE REIGNS. 



BEGINNING WITH KING ALFRED THE GREAT. 



THE SAXONS. 



The Eeign of Alfred the Great . . began 

The Eeign of Edward the elder . . began 

The Eeign of Athelstan began 

The Eeign s of the Six Boy -Kings . began 



871 . ended in 901 . lasted 30 years. 

901 . ended in 925 . lasted 24 years. 

n 925 . ended in 941 . lasted 16 years. 

941 . ended in 1016 . lasted 75 years. 



THE DANES, AND THE RESTORED SAXONS. 

The Eeign of Canute began in 1016 . ended in 1035 . lasted 19 years. 

The Eeign of Harold Harefoot . . began in 1035 . ended in 1040 . lasted 5 years. 

The Eeign of Hardicanute .... began in 1040 . ended in 1042 . lasted 2 years. 

The Eeign of Edward the Confessor, began in 1042 . ended in 1066 . lasted 24 years. 

The Eeign of Harold the Second, and the Norman Conquest, were also 
within the year 1066. 

THE NORMANS. 

'^^tL^CoMuei^^^?^™*^^^ • ended in 1087 . lasted 21 years, 

'^^cllkdlufui™^'".*^^ ^^^^^'l; [began in 1087 . ended in 1100 . lasted 13 years. 

The Eeign of Henry the First, called I >.„„„„ • -.-mn „ a^a • hok t 4^ a o~ 

Fine-Scholar l '^^o^^ iQ 1100 . ended m 113o . lasted 3o years. 

The Eeigns of Matilda and Stephen . began in 1135 . ended in 1154 . lasted 19 years. 
THE PLANTAGENETS. 



The Eeign of Henry the Second . . 
The Eeign of Eichard the First, called 

the Lion-Heart 

The Eeign of John, called Lackland 
The Eeign of Henry the Third . 
The Eeign of Edward the First, called 

Longshanks 

The Eeign of Edward the Second 
The Eeign of Edward the Third . 
The Eeign of Eichard the Second 
The Eeign of Henry the Fourth, 

called Bolingbroke .... 
The Eeign of Henry the Fifth . 
The Eeign of Henry the Sixth . 
The Eeign of Edward the Fourth 
The Eeign of Edward the Fifth . 
The Eeign of Eichard the Third . 



began 

- began 

began 
began 

► began 

began 
began 
began 
> began 

began 
began 
began 

began 

began in 1483 

319 



nll54 . 
nll89 . 

.nll99 . 
nl216 . 
in 1272 . 

n 1307 . 
nl327 . 
n 1877 . 
nl399 . 
,n 1413 . 
nl422 . 
n 1461 . 



ended in 1189 . 

ended in 1199 . 

ended in 1216 . 
ended in 1272 , 

ended in 1307 . 
ended in 1327 , 
ended in 1377 . 
ended in 1399 , 
ended in 1413 

ended in 1422 
ended in 1461 
ended in 1483 

. ended in 1483 

. ended in 1485 



lasted 35 years. 

lasted 10 years. 

lasted 17 years, 
lasted 56 years. 

. lasted 35 years. 

. lasted 20 years. 

. lasted 50 years. 

. lasted 22 years. 

. lasted 14 years. 

. lasted 9 years. 
. lasted 39 years. 
. lasted 22 years, 
j lasted a few 
■ I weeks. 
. lasted 2 years. 



320 



TABLE OF THE REIGNS. 



THE TUDORS. 



The Keign of Henry the Seventh 
The Keign of Henry the Eighth 
The Keign of Edward the Sixth 
The Keign of Mary .... 
The Eeign of Elizabeth . . . 



began in 1485 , 

began in 1509 . 

began in 1547 . 

began in 1553 . 

began in 1558 . 



ended in 1509 . 
ended in 1547 . 
ended in 1553 . 
ended in 1558 . 
ended in 1603 . 



lasted 24 years, 
lasted 38 years, 
lasted 6 years, 
lasted 5 years, 
lasted 45 years. 



THE STUARTS. 



The Eeign of James the First 
The Eeign of Charles the First 



began in 1603 . 
began in 1625 . 



ended in 1625 . 
ended in 1649 . 



lasted 22 years, 
lasted 24 years. 



THE COMMONWEALTH. 



The Council of State and Govern- K^„„„ . -,„.o ^^, ^ ,-^ ickq 

ment by Parliament j- began m 1649 . ended m 1653 . 

The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell began in 1653 . ended in 1658 . 

The Protectorate of Kichard Crom- K ^„„„ . ^„^„ , , . ^„_„ 

^g]^ >-beganml658 . ended m 1659 . 

The Council of State, and Govern-/ ,. ^^~n -, j • -.^/./^ 

ment by Parliament f resumed m 1659 ended m 1660 . 



lasted 4 years, 
lasted 5 years. 

j lasted 7 

I months. 

j lasted 13 

j months. 



THE STUARTS RESTORED. 



The Keign of Charles the Second 
The Keign of James the Second . 



ended in 1685 . 
ended in 1688 . 



lasted 25 years, 
lasted 3 years. 



THE REVOLUTION. — 1688. (Comprised in the concluding 
chapter. ) 

The Keign of William III. and Mary j^^^^^j^^ggg ended in 1695 . lasted 6 years. 

The Keign of William III ended in 1702 . lasted 13 years. 

The Reign of Anne began in 1702 . ended in 1714 . lasted 12 years. 

The Keign of George the First . . began in 1714 . ended in 1727 . lasted 13 years. 

The Keign of George the Second . . began in 1727 . ended in 1760 . lasted 33 years. 

The Keign of George the Third . . began in 1760 . ended in 1820 . lasted 60 years. 

The Keign of George the Fourth . . began in 1820 . ended in 1830 . lasted 10 years. 

The Keign of William the Fourth . began in 1830 . ended in 1837 . lasted 7 years. 

The Eeign of Victoria began in 1837. 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE, AND TABLE OF 
CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Ancient England and the Komans. From 50 years before 

Christ, to the year of our Lord 450 327 

CHAPTER II 

Ancient England under the Early Saxons. From the year 

450, to the year 871 335 

CHAPTER III 

England under the Good Saxon Alfred, and Edward the 

Elder. From the year 871, to the year 901 . . . 339 

CHAPTER IV 

England under Athelstan and the Six Boy-Kings. From 

the year 925, to the year 1016 344 

CHAPTER V 

England under Canute the Dane. From the year 1016, to 

the year 1035 353 

CHAPTER VI 

England under Harold Harefoot, Hardicanute, and Ed- 
ward the Confessor. From the year 1035, to the year 

1066 354 

321 



322 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE, AND CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VII 

PAGE 

England under Harold the Second, and Conquered by 

THE Normans. All in the same year, 1066 .... 361 



CHAPTER VIII 

England under William the First, the Norman Conqueror. 

From the year 1066, to the year 1087 364 



CHAPTER IX 

England under William the Second, called Rufus. From 

the year 1087, to the year 1100 .370 

CHAPTER X 

England under Henry the First, called Fine-Scholar. 

From the year 1100, to the year 1135 377 



CHAPTER XI 

England under Matilda and Stephen. From the year 1135, 

to the year 1154 385 

CHAPTER XII 

Parts First and Second. 

England under Henry the Second. From the year ^154, to 

the year 1189 388 

CHAPTER XIII 

England under Richard the First, called the Lion- 
Heart. From the year 1189, to the year 1199 . . . 404 



CHAPTER XIV 

England under John, called Lackland. From tho year 

1199, to the year 1216 412 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE, AND CONTENTS. 323 



CHAPTER XV 

PAGE 

England under Henry the Third. Erom the year 1216, to 

the year 1272 423 



CHAPTER XVI 

England under Edward the First, called Longshanks. 

Erom the year 1272, to the year 1307 433 

CHAPTER XVII 

England under Edward the Second. From the year 1307, 

to the year 1327 447 

CHAPTER XVIII 

England under Edward the Third. From the year 1327, to 

the year 1377 455 

CHAPTER XIX 

England under Richard the Second. From the year 1377, 

to the year 1399 467 

CHAPTER XX 

England under Henrt the Fourth, called Bolingbroke. 

From the year 1399, to the year 1413 476 

CHAPTER XXI 

Parts First and Second. 

England under Henry the Fifth. From the year 1413, to 

the year 1422 .481 

CHAPTER XXII 

Parts First, Second (The Story of Joan of Arc), and Third. 

England under Henry the Sixth. From the year 1422, to 

the year 1461 489 



324 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE, AND CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

PAGE 

England under Edward the Fourth. From the year 1461, 

to the year 1483 506 



CHAPTER XXIV 

England under Edward the Fifth. For a few weeks in the 

year 1483 614 



CHAPTER XXV 

England under Richard the Third. From the year 1483, 

to the year 1485 518 



CHAPTER XXVI 

England under Henry the Seventh. From the year 1485, 

to the year 1509 521 



CHAPTER XXVII 

England under Henry the Eighth, called Bluff King 
Hal and Burly King Harry. From the year 1509, to 
the year 1533 530 

CHAPTER XXVIII 

England under Henry the Eighth, called Bluff King 
Hal and Burly King Harry. From the year 1533, to 
the year 1547 540 

CHAPTER XXIX 

England under Edward the Sixth. From the year 1547, to 

the year 1553 549 

CHAPTER XXX 
England under Mary. From the year 1553, to the year 1558 555 



CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE, AND CONTENTS. 325 

CHAPTER XXXI 

Farts First, Second, and Third. 

PAGE 

England under Elizabeth. Erom the year 1558, to the year 

1603 567 

CHAPTER XXXII 

Fai'ts First and Second. 

England under James the Eirst. Erom the year 1603, to 

the year 1625 588 

CHAPTER XXXIII 

Farts First, Second, Third, and Fourth. 

England under Charles the Eirst. Erom the year 1625, to 

the year 1649 601 

CHAPTER XXXIV 

Farts First and Second. 

England under Oliver Cromwell. Erom the year 1649, to 

the year 1660 627 

CHAPTER XXXV 

Farts First and Second. 

England under Charles the Second, called the Merry 

Monarch. From the year 1660, to the year 1685 . . 641 

CHAPTER XXXVI 

England under James the Second. Erom the year 1685, to 

the year 1688 659 

CHAPTER XXXVII 

Conclusion. From the year 1688, to the year 1837 . . . 670 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

PAGE 
ALFRED IN THE NEATHERd's COTTAGE . . . FrOTltispiece 

THE FINDING OF THE BODY OF RUFUS 376 

ARTHUR AND HUBERT 415 

THE INTERCESSION OF QUEEN PHILIPPA FOR THE CITIZENS OF 

CALAIS 463 

JOAN OF ARC TENDING HER FLOCK 492 

QUEEN MARGARET AND THE ROBBER ...... 508 

LADY JANE GREY WATCHING THE BODY OF HER HUSBAND BEING 

CARRIED PAST HER WINDOW AFTER EXECUTION . . . 560 

CHARLES I, TAKING LEAVE OF HIS CHILDREN .... 625 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

CHAPTER I. 

ANCIENT ENGLAND AND THE ROMANS. 

If you look at a Map of the World, you will see, in the left-hand 
upper corner of the Eastern Hemisphere, two Islands lying in the 
sea. They are England and Scotland, and Ireland. England and 
Scotland form the greater part of these Islands. Ireland is the 
next in size. The little neighbouring islands, which are so small 
upon the Map as to be mere dots, are chiefly little bits of Scotland 
— broken off, I dare say, in the course of a great length of time, 
by the power of the restless water. 

In the old days, a long, long while ago, before Our Saviour was 
born on earth and lay asleep in a manger, these Islands were in the 
same place, and the stormy sea roared round them, just as it roars 
now. But the sea was not alive, then, with great ships and brave 
sailors, sailing to and from all parts of the world. It was very 
lonely. The Islands lay solitary, in the great expanse of water. 
The foaming waves dashed against their cliff's, and the bleak winds 
blew over their forests; but the winds and waves brought no 
adventurers to land upon the Islands, and the savage Islanders 
knew nothing of the rest of the world, and the rest of the world 
knew nothing of them. 

It is supposed that the Phoenicians, who were an ancient people, 
famous for carrying on trade, came in ships to these Islands, and 
found that they produced tin and lead ; both very useful things, as 
you know, and both produced to this very hour upon the sea-coast. 
The most celebrated tin mines in Cornwall are, still, close to the 
sea. One of them, which I have seen, is so close to it that it is 
hollowed out underneath the ocean ; and the miners say, that in 
stormy weather, when they are at work down in that deep place, 
they can hear the noise of the waves thundering above their heads. 
327 



328 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

So, the Phoenicians, coasting about the Islands, would come, with- 
out much difficulty, to where the tin and lead were. 

The Phoenicians traded with the Islanders for these metals, and 
gave the Islanders some other useful things in exchange. The 
Islanders were, at first, poor savages, going almost naked, or only 
dressed in the rough skins of beasts, and staining their bodies, as 
other savages do, with coloured earths and the juices of plants. 
But the Phoenicians, sailing over to the opposite coasts of France 
and Belgium, and saying to the people there, " We have been to 
those white cliffs across the water, which you can see in fine weather, 
and from that country, which is called Britain, we bring this 'tin 
and lead," tempted some of the French and Belgians to come over 
also. These people settled themselves on the south coast of Eng- 
land, which is now called Kent ; and, although they were a rough 
people too, they taught the savage Britons some useful arts, and 
improved that part of the Islands. It is probable that other people 
came over from Spain to Ireland, and settled there. 

Thus, by little and little, strangers became mixed with the 
Islanders, and the savage Britons grew into a wild bold people ; 
almost savage, still, especially in the interior of the country away 
from the sea where the foreign settlers seldom went ; but hardy, 
brave, and strong. 

The whole country was covered with forests, and swamps. The 
greater part of it was very misty and cold. There were no roads, 
no bridges, no streets, no houses that you would think deserving of 
the name. A town was nothing but a collection of straw-covered 
huts, hidden in a thick wood, with a ditch all round, and a low 
wall, made of mud, or the trunks of trees placed one upon another. 
The people planted little or no corn, but lived upon the flesh of 
their flocks and cattle. They made no coins, but used metal rings 
for money. They were clever in basket-work, as savage people 
often are ; and they could make a coarse kind of cloth, and some 
very bad earthenware. But in building fortresses they were much 
more clever. 

They made boats of basket-work, covered with the skins of ani- 
mals, but seldom, if ever, ventured far from the shore. They made 
swords, of copper mixed with tin ; but, these swords were of an 
awkward shape, and so soft that a heavy blow would bend one. 
They made light shields, short pointed daggers, and spears — which 
they jerked back after they had thrown them at an enemy, by a 
long strip of leather fastened to the stem. The butt-end was a 
rattle, to frighten an enemy's horse. The ancient Britons, being 
divided into as many as thirty or forty tribes, each commanded by 
its own little king, were constantly fighting with one anotlier, as 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 329 

savage people usually do ; and they always fought with these 
weapons. 

They were very fond of horses. The standard of Kent was the 
picture of a white horse. They could break them in and manage 
them wonderfully well. Indeed, the horses (of which they had an 
abundance, though they were rather small) were so well taught in 
those days, that they can scarcely be said to have improved since ; 
though the men are so much wiser. They understood, and obeyed, 
every word of command ; and would stand still by themselves, in 
all the din and noise of battle, while their masters went to fight on 
foot.' The Britons could not have succeeded in their most remark- 
able art, without the aid of these sensible and trusty animals. The 
art I mean, is the construction and management of war-chariots or 
cars, for which they have ever been celebrated in history. Each 
of the best sort of these chariots, not quite breast high in front, 
and open at the back, contained one man to drive, and two or 
three others to fight — all standing up. The horses who drew 
them were so well trained, that they would tear, at full gallop, 
over the most stony ways, and even through the woods ; dashing 
down their masters' enemies beneath their hoofs, and cutting them 
to pieces with the blades of swords, or scythes, which were fastened 
to the wheels, and stretched out beyond the car on each side, for 
that cruel purpose. In a moment, while at full speed, the horses 
would stop, at the driver's command. The men within would leap 
out, deal blows about them with their swords like hail, leap on 
the horses, on the pole, spring back into the chariots anyhow ; and, 
as soon as they were safe, the horses tore away again. 

The Britons had a strange and terrible religion, called the Re- 
ligion of the Druids. It seems to have been brought over, in very 
early times indeed, from the opposite country of France, anciently 
called Gaul, and to have mixed up the worship of the Serpent, 
and of the Sun and Moon, with the worship of some of the 
Heathen Gods and Goddesses. Most of its ceremonies were kept 
secret by the priests, the Druids, who pretended to be enchanters, 
and who carried magicians' wands, and wore, each of them, about 
his neck, what he told the ignorant people was a Serpent's egg in 
a golden case. But it is certain that the Druidical ceremonies in- 
cluded the sacrifice of human victims, the torture of some sus- 
pected criminals, and, on particular occasions, even the burning 
alive, in immense wicker cages, of a number of men and animals 
together. The Druid Priests had some kind of veneration for the 
Oak, and for the mistletoe — the same plant that we hang up in 
houses at Christmas Time now — when its white berries grew 
upon the Oak. They met together in dark woods, which they 



330 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

called Sacred Groves ; and there they instructed, in their myste- 
rious arts, young men who came to them as pupils, and who some- 
times stayed with them as long as twenty years. 

These Druids built great Temples and altars, open to the sky, 
fragments of some of which are yet remaining. Stonehenge, on 
Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire, is the most extraordinary of these. 
Three curious stones, called Kits Coty House, on Bluebell Hill, 
near Maidstone, in Kent, form another. We know, from examina- 
tion of the great blocks of which such buildings are made, that 
they could not have been raised without the aid of some ingenious 
machines, which are common now, but which the ancient Britons 
certainly did not use in making their own uncomfortable houses. 
I should not wonder if the Druids, and their pupils who stayed 
with them twenty years, knowing more than the rest of the 
Britons, kept the people out of sight while they made these build- 
ings, and then pretended that they built them by magic. Perhaps 
they had a hand in the fortresses too ; at all events, as they were 
very powerful, and very much believed in, and as they made and 
executed the laws, and paid no taxes, I don't wonder that they 
liked their trade. And, as they persuaded the people the more 
Druids there were, the better off the people would be, I don't 
wonder that there were a good many of them. But it is pleasant 
to think that there are no Druids, now, who go on in that way, 
and pretend to carry Enchanters' Wands and Serpents' Eggs — 
and of course there is nothing of the kind, anywhere. 

Such was the improved condition of the ancient Britons, fifty- 
five years before the birth of Our Saviour, when the Romans, 
under their great General, Julius Caesar, were masters of all the 
rest of the known world. Julius Osesar had then just conquered 
Gaul ; and hearing, in Gaul, a good deal about the opposite Island 
with the white 0115*8, and about the bravery of the Britons who 
inhabited it — some of whom had been fetched over to help the 
Gauls in the war against him — he resolved, as he was so near, to 
come and conquer Britain next. 

So, Julius Csesar came sailing over to this Island of ours, with 
eighty vessels and twelve thousand men. And he came from the 
French coast between Calais and Boulogne, " because thence was 
the shortest passage into Britain ; " just for the same reason as 
our steam-boats now take the same track, every day. He expected 
to conquer Britain easily : but it was not such easy work as he 
supposed — for the bold Britons fought most bravely ; and, what 
with not having his horse-soldiers with him (for they had been 
driven back by a storm), and what with having some of his vessels 
dashed to pieces by a high tide after they were drawn ashore, he 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 331 

ran great risk of being totally defeated. However, for once that 
the bold Britons beat him, he beat them twice; though not so 
soundly but that he was very glad to accept their proposals of 
peace, and go away. 

But, in the spring of the next year, he came back ; this time, 
with eight hundred vessels and thirty thousand men. The British 
tribes chose, as their general-in-chief, a Briton, whom the Eomans 
in their Latin language called Cassivellaunus, but whose Brit- 
ish name is supposed to have been Caswallon. A brave general 
he was, and well he and his soldiers fought the Eoman army ! So 
well, that whenever in that war the Roman soldiers saw a great 
cloud of dust, and heard the rattle of the rapid British chariots, 
they trembled in their hearts. Besides a number of smaller battles, 
there was a battle fought near Canterbury, in Kent j there was a 
battle fought near Chertsey, in Surrey ; there was a battle fought 
near a marshy little town in a wood, the capital of that part of 
Britain which belonged to Cassivellaunus, and which was prob- 
ably near what is now Saint Albans, in Hertfordshire. However, 
brave Cassivellaunus had the worst of it, on the whole ; though 
he and his men always fought like lions. As the other British 
chiefs were jealous of him, and were always quarrelling with him, 
and with one another, he gave up, and proposed peace. Julius 
Caesar was very glad to grant peace easily, and to go away again 
with all his remaining ships and men. He had expected to find 
pearls in Britain, and he may have found a few for anything I 
know; but, at all events, he found delicious oysters, and I am 
sure he found tough Britons — of whom, I dare say, he made 
the same complaint as Napoleon Bonaparte the great French 
General did, eighteen hundred years afterwards, when he said 
they were such unreasonable fellows that they never knew when 
they were beaten. They never did know, I believe, and never 
will. 

Nearly a hundred years passed on, and all that time, there was 
peace in Britain. The Britons improved their towns and mode of 
life : became more civilised, travelled, and learnt a great deal from 
the Gauls and Romans. At last, the Roman Emperor, Claudius, 
sent AuLUS Plautius, a skilful general, with a mighty force, to 
subdue the Island, and shortly afterwards arrived himself. They 
did little ; and Ostorius Scapula, another general, came. Some 
of the British Chiefs of Tribes submitted. Others resolved to 
fight to the death. Of these brave men, the bravest was Carac- 
TACUS, or Caradoc, who gave battle to the Romans, with his 
army, among the mountains of North Wales. " This day," said 
he to his soldiers, " decides the fate of Britain ! Your liberty, or 



332 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

your eternal slavery, dates from this hour. Kemember your brave 
ancestors, who drove the great Caesar himself across the sea ! " On 
hearing these words, his men, with a great shout, rashed upon the 
Komans. But the strong Roman swords and armour were too 
much for the weaker British weapons in close conflict. The 
Britons lost the day. The wife and daughter of the brave 
Caractacus were taken prisoners ; his brothers delivered them- 
selves up j he himself was betrayed into the hands of the Romans 
by his false and base step-mother ; and they carried him, and all 
his family, in triumph to Rome. 

But a great man will be great in misfortune, great in prison, 
great in chains. His noble air, and dignified endurance of distress, 
so touched the Roman people who thronged the streets to see him, 
that he and his family were restored to freedom. No one knows 
whether his great heart broke, and he died in Rome, or whether 
he ever returned to his own dear country. English oaks have 
grown up from acorns, and withered away, when they were hun- 
dreds of years old — and other oaks have sprung up in their places, 
and died too, very aged — since the rest of the history of the brave 
Caeactacus was forgotten. 

Still, the Britons tvould not yield. They rose again and again, 
and died by thousands, sword in hand. They rose, on every possi- 
ble occasion. Suetonius, another Roman general, came, and 
stormed the Island of Anglesey (then called Mona), which was 
supposed to be sacred, and he burnt the Druids in their own wicker 
cages, by their own fires. But, even while he was in Britain, with 
his victorious troops, the Britons rose. Because Boadicea, a 
British queen, the widow of the King of the Norfolk and Suffolk 
people, resisted the plundering of her property by the Romans who 
were settled in England, she was scourged, by order of Catus a 
Roman officer ; and her two daughters were shamefully insulted in 
her presence, and her husband's relations were made slaves. To 
avenge this injury, the Britons rose, with aU their might and rage. 
They drove Catus into Gaul ; they laid the Roman possessions 
waste ; they forced the Romans out of London, then a poor little 
town, but a trading place ; they hanged, burnt, crucified, and slew 
by the sword, seventy thousand Romans in a few days. Suetonius 
strengthened his army, and advanced to give them battle. They 
strengthened their army, and desperately attacked his, on the field 
where it was strongly posted. Before the first charge of the 
Britons was made, Boadicea, in a war-chariot, with her fair hair 
streaming in the wind, and her injured daughters lying at her feet, 
drove among the troops, and cried to them for vengeance on their 
oppressors, the licentious Romans. The Britons fought to the 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 333 

last; but they were vanquished with great slaughter, and the 
unhappy queen took poison. 

Still, the spirit of the Britons was not broken. When Sueto- 
nius left the country, they fell upon his troops, and retook the 
Island of Anglesey. Agricola came, fifteen or twenty years after- 
wards, and retook it once more, and devoted seven years to sub- 
duing the country, especially that part of it which is now called 
Scotland ; but, its people, the Caledonians, resisted him at every 
inch of ground. They fought the bloodiest battles with him ; they 
killed their very wives and children, to prevent his making pris- 
oners of them ; they fell, fighting, in such great numbers that 
certain hills in Scotland are yet supposed to be vast heaps of stones 
piled up above their graves. Hadrian came, thirty years after- 
wards, and still they resisted him. Severus came, nearly a hun- 
dred years afterwards, and they worried his great army like dogs, 
and rejoiced to see them die, by thousands, in the bogs and swamps. 
Caracalla, the son and successor of Severus, did the most to 
conquer them, for a time; but not by force of arms. He knew 
how little that would do. He yielded up a quantity of land to 
the Caledonians, and gave the Britons the same privileges as the 
Romans possessed. There was peace, after this, for seventy years. 

Then new enemies arose. They were the Saxons, a fierce, sea- 
faring people from the countries to the North of the Rhine, the 
great river of Germany on the banks of which the best grapes 
grow to make the German wine. They began to come, in pirate 
ships, to the sea-coast of Gaul and Britain, and to plunder them. 
They were repulsed by Carausius, a native either of Belgium or 
of Britain, who was appointed by the Romans to the command, 
and under whom the Britons first began to fight upon the sea. 
But, after this time, they renewed their ravages. A few years 
more, and the Scots (which was then the name for the people of 
Ireland), and the Picts, a northern people, began to make frequent 
plundering incursions into the South of Britain. All these attacks 
were repeated, at intervals, during two hundred years, and through 
a long succession of Roman Emperors and chiefs ; during all which 
length of time, the Britons rose against the Romans, over and over 
again. At last, in the days of the Roman Honorius, when the 
Roman power all over the world was fast declining, and when 
Rome wanted all her soldiers at home, the Romans abandoned aU 
hope of conquering Britain, and went away. And stiU, at last, 
as at first, the Britons rose against them, in their old brave 
manner; for, a very little while before, they had turned away 
the Roman magistrates, and declared themselves an independent 
people. 



334 A CHILD'S HISTOHY OF ENGLAND. 

Five hundred years had passed, since Julius Csesar's first inva- 
sion of the Island, when the Komans departed from it for ever. 
In the course of that time, although they had been the cause of 
terrible fighting and bloodshed, they had done much to improve 
the condition of the Britons. They had made great military roads ; 
they had built forts ; they had taught them how to dress, and arm 
themselves, much better than they had ever known how to do 
before ; they had refined the whole British way of living. Agric- 
OLA had built a great wall of earth, more than seventy miles long, 
extending from Newcastle to beyond Carlisle, for the purpose of 
keeping out the Picts and Scots ; Hadrian had strengthened it ; 
Severus, finding it much in want of repair, had built it afresh of 
stone. Above ail, it was in the Roman time, and by means of 
Roman ships, that the Christian Religion was first brought into 
Britain, and its people first taught the great lesson that, to be 
good in the sight of God, they must love their neighbours as them- 
selves, and do unto others as they would be done by. The Druids 
declared that it was very wicked to believe in any such thing, and 
cursed all the people who did believe it, very heartily. But, when 
the people found that they were none the better for the blessings 
of the Druids, and none the worse for the curses of the Druids, 
but, that the sun shone and the rain fell without consulting the 
Druids at all, they just began to think that the Druids were mere 
men, and that it signified very little whether they cursed or blessed. 
After which, the pupils of the Druids fell off greatly in numbers, 
and the Druids took to other trades. 

Thus I have come to the end of the Roman time in England. 
It is but little that is known of those five hundred years ; but some 
remains of them are still found. Often, when labourers are digging 
up the ground, to make foundations for houses or churches, they 
light on rusty money that once belonged to the Romans. Frag- 
ments of plated from which they ate, of goblets from which they 
drank, and of pavement on which they trod, are discovered among 
the earth that is broken by the plough, or the dust that is crumbled 
by the gardener's spade. Wells that the Romans sunk, still yield 
water ; roads that the Romans made, form part of our highways. 
In some old battle-fields, British spear-heads and Roman armour 
have been found, mingled together in decay, as they fell in the thick 
pressure of the fight. Traces of Roman camps overgrown with grass, 
and of mounds that are the burial-places of heaps of Britons, are 
to be seen in almost all parts of the country. Across the bleak 
moors of Northumberland, the wall of Severus, overrun with moss 
and weeds, still stretches, a strong ruin ; and the shepherds and 
their dogs lie sleeping on it in the summer weather. On Salisbury 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 335 

Plain, Stonehenge yet stands : a monument of the earlier time when 
the Roman name was unknown in Britain, and when the Druids, 
with their best magic wands, could not have written it in the sands 
of the wild sea-shore. 



CHAPTER II. 

ANCIENT ENGLAND UNDER THE EAELY SAXONS. 

The Romans had scarcely gone away from Britain, when the 
Britons began to wish they had never left it. For, the Roman sol- 
diers being gone, and the Britons being much reduced in numbers 
by their long wars, the Picts and Scots came pouring in, over the 
broken and unguarded wall of Severus, in swarms. They plun- 
dered the richest towns, and killed the people ; and came back so 
often for more booty and more slaughter, that the unfortunate 
Britons lived a life of terror. As if the Picts and Scots were not 
bad enough on land, the Saxons attacked the islanders by sea ; and, 
as if something more were still wanting to make them miserable, 
they quarrelled bitterly among themselves as to what prayers they 
ought to say, and how they ought to say them. The priests, being 
very angry with one another on these questions, cursed one another 
in the heartiest manner; and (uncommonly like the old Druids) 
cursed all the people whom they could not persuade. So, altogether, 
the Britons were very badly off, you may believe. 

They were in such distress, in short, that they sent a letter to 
Rome entreating help — which they called the Groans of the Britons ; 
and in which they said, ^' The barbarians chase us into the sea, the 
sea throws us back upon the barbarians, and we have only the hard 
choice left us of perishing by the sword, or perishing by the waves." 
But, the Romans could not help them, even if they were so inclined ; 
for they had enough to do to defend themselves against their own 
enemies, who were then very fierce and strong. At last, the Britons, 
unable to bear their hard condition any longer, resolved to make 
peace with the Saxons, and to invite the Saxons to come into their 
country, and help them to keep out the Picts and Scots. 

It was a British Prince named Vortigern who took this resolu- 
tion, and who made a treaty of friendship with Hengist and Horsa, 
two Saxon chiefs. Both of these names, in the old Saxon language, 
signify Horse ; for the Saxons, like many other nations in a rough 
state, were fond of giving men the names of animals, as Horse, 
Wolf, Bear, Hound. The Indians of North America, — a very in- 
ferior people to the Saxons, though — do the same to this day. 



336 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Hengist and Horsa drove out the Picts and Scots ; and Vorti- 
GERN, being grateful to them for that service, made no opposition 
to their settling themselves in that part of England which is called 
the Isle of Thanet, or to their inviting over more of their country- 
men to join them. But Hengist had a beautiful daughter named 
RowENA ; and when, at a feast, she filled a golden goblet to the 
brim with wine, and gave it to Vortigern, saying in a sweet voice, 
" Dear King, thy health ! " the King fell in love with her. My 
opinion is, that the cunning Hengist meant him to do so, in order 
that the Saxons might have greater influence with him; and 
that the fair Rowena came to that feast, golden goblet and all, 
on purpose. 

At any rate, they were married ; and, long afterwards, whenever 
the King was angry with the Saxons, or jealous of their encroach- 
ments, Rowena would put her beautiful arms round his neck, and 
softly say, " Dear King, they are my people ! Be favourable to 
them, as you loved that Saxon girl who gave you the golden gob- 
let of wine at the feast ! " And, really, I don't see how the King 
could help himself. 

Ah ! We must all die ! In the course of years, Vortigern 
died — he was dethroned, and put in prison, first, I am afraid ; 
and Rowena died ; and generations of Saxons and Britons died ; 
and events that happened during a long, long time, would have 
been quite forgotten but for the tales and songs of the old Bards, 
who used to go about from feast to feast, with their white beards, 
recounting the deeds of their forefathers. Among the histories of 
which they sang and talked, there was a famous one, concerning 
the bravery and virtues of King Arthur, supposed to have been 
a British Prince in those old times. But, whether such a person 
really lived, or whether there were several persons whose histories 
came to be confused together under that one name, or whether all 
about him was invention, no one knows. 

I will tell you, shortly, what is most interesting in the early 
Saxon times, as they are described in these songs and stories of the 
Bards. 

In, and long after, the days of Vortigern, fresh bodies of Sax- 
ons, under various chiefs, came pouring into Britain. One body, 
conquering the Britons in the East, and settling there, called their 
kingdom Essex ; another body settled in the West, and called their 
kingdom Wessex; the Northfolk, or Norfolk people, established 
themselves in one place ; the Southfolk, or Suffolk people, estab- 
lished themselves in another; and gradually seven kingdoms or 
states arose in England, which were called the Saxon Heptarchy. 
The poor Britons, falling back before these crowds of fighting men 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 337 

whom they had innocently invited over as friends, retired into 
Wales and the adjacent country; into Devonshire, and into Corn- 
wall. Those parts of England long remained unconquered. And 
in Cornwall now — where the sea-coast is very gloomy, steep, and 
rugged — where, in the dark winter-time, ships have often been 
wrecked close to the land, and every soul on board has perished — 
where the winds and ^^aves howl drearily, and split the solid rocks 
into arches and caverns — ■ there are very ancient ruins, which the 
people call the ruins of King Arthur's Castle. 

Kent is the most famous of the seven Saxon kingdoms, because 
the Christian religion was preached to the Saxons there (who dom- 
ineered over the Britons too much, to care for what they said about 
their religion, or anything else) by Augustine, a monk from Rome. 
King Ethelbeet, of Kent, was soon converted ; and the moment 
he said he was a Christian, his courtiers all said they were Chris- 
tians ; after which, ten thousand of his subjects said they were 
Christians too. Augustine built a little church, close to this 
King's palace, on the ground now occupied by the beautiful cathe- 
dral of Canterbury. Sebert, the King's nephew, built on a muddy 
marshy place near London, where there had been a temple to 
Apollo, a church dedicated to Saint Peter, which is now Westmin- 
ster Abbey. And, in London itself, on the foundation of a temple to 
Diana, he built another little church, which has risen up, since that 
old time, to be Saint Paul's. 

After the death of Ethelbert, Edwin, King of Northumbria, 
who was such a good king that it was said a woman or child might 
openly carry a purse of gold, in his reign, without fear, allowed 
his child to be baptised, and held a great council to consider 
whether he and his people should all be Christians or not. It was 
decided that they should be. Coifi, the chief priest of the old 
religion, made a great speech on the occasion. In this discourse, 
he told the people that he had found out the old gods to be impos- 
tors, "lam quite satisfied of it," he said. "Look at me ! I 
have been serving them all my life, and they have done nothing for 
me ; whereas, if they had been really powerful, they could not have 
decently done less, in return for all I have done for them, than 
make my fortune. As they have never made my fortune, I am 
quite convinced they are impostors ! " When this singular priest 
had finished speaking, he hastily armed himself with sword and 
lance, mounted a war-horse, rode at a furious gallop in sight of all 
the people to the temple, and flung his lance against it as an insult. 
From that time, the Christian rehgion spread itself among the Sax- 
ons, and became their faith. 

The next very famous prince was Egbert. He lived about a 



338 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

hundred and fifty years afterwards, and claimed to have a better 
right to the throne of Wessex than Beoetric, another Saxon 
prince who was at the head of that kingdom, and who married 
Edburga, the daughter of Offa, king of another of the seven king- 
doms. This Queen Edburga was a handsome murderess, who 
poisoned people when they offended her. One day, she mixed a 
cup of poison for a certain noble belonging to the court ; but her 
husband drank of it too, by mistake, and died. Upon this, the 
people revolted, in great crowds ; and running to the palace, and 
thundering at the gates, cried, " Down with the wicked queen, who 
poisons men ! " They drove her out of the country, and abolished 
the title she had disgraced. When years had passed away, some 
travellers came home from Italy, and said that in the town of Pavia 
they had seen a ragged beggar-woman, who had once been hand- 
some, but was then shrivelled, bent, and yellow, wandering about 
the streets, crying for bread; and that this beggar-woman was the 
poisoning English queen. It was, indeed, Edburga; and so she 
died, without a shelter for her wretched head. 

Egbert, not considering himself safe in England, in consequence 
of his having claimed the crown of Wessex (for he thought his 
rival might take him prisoner and put him to death), sought refuge 
at the court of Charlemagne, King of France. On the death of 
Beortric, so unhappily poisoned by mistake, Egbert came back 
to Britain ; succeeded to the throne of Wessex ; conquered some of 
the other monarchs of the seven kingdoms ; added their territories 
to his own ; and, for the first time, called the country over which he 
ruled, England. 

And now, new enemies arose, who, for a long time, troubled 
England sorely. These were the Northmen, the people of Den- 
mark and Norway, whom the English called the Danes. They were 
a warlike people, quite at home upon the sea ; not Christians ; very- 
daring and cruel. They came over in ships, and plundered and 
burned wheresoever they landed. Once, they beat Egbert in battle. 
Once, Egbert beat them. But, they cared no more for being 
beaten than the English themselves. In the four following short 
reigns, of Ethelwulf, and his sons, Ethelbald, Ethelbert, and 
Ethelred, they came back, over and over again, burning and plun- 
dering, and laying England waste. In the last-mentioned reign, 
they seized Edmund, King of East England, and bound him to a 
tree. Then, they proposed to him that he should change his relig- 
ion ; but he, being a good Christian, steadily refused. Upon that, 
they beat him, made cowardly jests upon him, all defenceless as he 
was, shot arrows at him, and, finally, struck off his head. It is 
impossible to say whose head they might have struck off next, but 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 339 

for the death of King Ethelred from a wound he had received 
in fighting against them, and the succession to his throne of the 
best and wisest king that ever lived in England. 



CHAPTER III. 

ENGLAND UNDER THE GOOD SAXON, ALFRED. 

Alfred the Great was a young man, three-and-twenty years 
of age, when he became king. Twice in his childhood, he had been 
taken to Rome, where the Saxon nobles were in the habit of going 
on journeys which they supposed to be religious ; and, once, he had 
stayed for some time in Paris. Learning, however, was so little 
cared for, then, that at twelve years old he had not been taught to 
read ; although, of the sons of King Ethelwulf, he, the young- 
est, was the favourite. But he had — as most men who grow up 
to be great and good are generally found to have had — an excellent 
mother ; and, one day, this lady, whose name was Osburga, hap- 
pened, as she was sitting among her sons, to read a book of Saxon 
poetry. The art of printing was not known until long and long 
after that period, and the book, which was written, was what is 
called "illuminated," with beautiful bright letters, richly painted. 
The brothers admiring it very much, their mother said, " I will give 
it to that one of you four princes who first learns to read." Alfred 
sought out a tutor that very day, applied himself to learn with 
great diligence, and soon won the book. He was proud of it, all 
his life. 

This great king, in the first year of his reign, fought nine battles 
with the Danes. He made some treaties with them too, by which 
the false Danes swore they would quit the country. They pre- 
tended to consider that they had taken a very solemn oath, in swear- 
ing this upon the holy bracelets that they wore, and which were 
always buried with them when they died ; but they cared little for 
it, for they thought nothing of breaking oaths and treaties too, as 
soon as it suited their purpose, and coming back again to fight, plun- 
der, and burn, as usual. One fatal winter, in the fourth year of 
King Alfred's reign, they spread themselves in great numbers 
over the whole of England ; and so dispersed and routed the King's 
soldiers that the King was left alone, and was obliged to disguise 
himself as a common peasant, and to take refuge in the cottage of 
one of his cowherds who did not know his face. 

Here, King Alfred, while the Danes sought him far and near, 
was left alone one day, by the cowherd's wife, to watch some cakes 



340 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

which she put to bake upon the hearth. But, being at work upon 
his bows and arrows, with which he hoped to punish the false Danes 
when a brighter time should come, and thinking deeply of his poor 
unhappy subjects whom the Danes chased through the land, his noble 
mind forgot the cakes, and they were burnt. " What ! " said the 
cowherd's wife, who scolded him well when she came back, and 
little thought that she was scolding the King, "you will be ready 
enough to eat them by-and-bye, and yet you cannot w^atch them, 
idle dog?" 

At length, the Devonshire men made head against a new host 
of Danes who landed on their coast ; killed their chief, and capt- 
ured their flag ; on which was represented the likeness of a Raven 
— a very fit bird for a thievish army like that, I think. The loss 
of their standard troubled the Danes greatly, for they believed it 
to be enchanted — woven by the three daughters of one father in 
a single afternoon — and they had a story among themselves that 
when they were victorious in battle, the Raven stretched his wings 
and seemed to fly ; and that when they were defeated, he would 
droop. He had good reason to droop, now, if he could have done 
anything half so sensible; for, King Alfeed joined the Devon- 
shire men ; made a camp with them on a piece of firm ground in 
the midst of a bog in Somersetshire; and prepared for a great 
attempt for vengeance on the Danes, and the deliverance of his 
oppressed people. 

But, first, as it was important to know how numerous those 
pestilent Danes were, and how they were fortified. King Alfeed, 
being a good musician, disguised himself as a glee-man or minstrel, 
and went, with his harp, to the Danish camp. He played and 
sang in the very tent of Gutheum the Danish leader, and enter- 
tained the Danes as they caroused. While he seemed to think of 
nothing but his music, he was watchful of their tents, their arms, 
their discipline, eveiything that he desired to know. And right 
soon did this great king entertain them to a different tune ; for, 
summoning all his true followers to meet him at an appointed 
place, where they received him with joyful shouts and tears, as the 
monarch whom many of them had given up for lost or dead, he put 
himself at their head, marched on the Danish camp, defeated the 
Danes with great slaughter, and besieged them for fourteen days to 
prevent their escape. But, being as merciful as he was good and 
brave, he then, instead of killing them, proposed peace : on condi- 
tion that they should altogether depart from that Western part of 
England, and settle in the East; and that Gutheum should 
become a Christian, in remembrance of the Divine religion which 
now taught his conqueror, the noble Alfeed, to forgive the enemy 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 341 

who had so often injured him. This, Guthrum did. At his bap- 
tism, King Alfred was his godfather. And Guthrum was an 
honourable chief who well deserved that clemency ; for, ever after- 
wards he was loyal and faithful to the king. The Danes under 
him were faithful too. They plundered and burned no more, but 
worked like honest men. They ploughed, and sowed, and reaped, 
and led good honest English lives. And I hope the children of 
those Danes played, many a time, with Saxon children in the sunny 
fields ; and that Danish young men fell in love with Saxon girls, 
and married them ; and that English travellers, benighted at the 
doors of Danish cottages, often went in for shelter until morning ; 
and that Danes and Saxons sat by the red fire, friends, talking of 
King Alfred the Great. 

All the Danes were not like these under Guthrum ; for, after 
some years, more of them came over, in the old plundering and 
burning way ■ — among them a fierce pirate of the name of Hast- 
ings, who had the boldness to sail up the Thames to Gravesend, 
with eighty ships. For three years there was a war with these 
Danes ; and there was a famine in the country, too, and a plague, 
both upon human creatures and beasts. But King Alfred, whose 
mighty heart never failed him, built large ships nevertheless, with 
which to pursue the pirates on the sea; and he encouraged his 
soldiers, by his brave example, to fight valiantly against them on 
the shore. At last, he drove them all away ; and then there was 
repose in England. 

As great and good in peace, as he was great and good in war. 
King Alfred never rested from his labours to improve his people. 
He loved to talk with clever men, and with travellers from foreign 
countries, and to write down what they told him, for his people to 
read. He had studied Latin after learning to read English, and 
now another of his labours was, to translate Latin books into the 
English-Saxon tongue, that his people might be interested, and 
improved by their contents. He made just laws, that they might 
live more happily and freely ; he turned away all partial judges, 
that no wrong might be done them ; he was so careful of their 
property, and punished robbers so severely, that it was a common 
thing to say that under the great King Alfred, garlands of 
golden chains and jewels might have hung across the streets, and 
no man would have touched one. He founded schools; he 
patiently heard causes himself in his Court of Justice ; the great 
desires of his heart were, to do right to all his subjects, and to 
leave England better, wiser, happier in all ways, than he found it. 
His industry in these efi'orts was quite astonishing. Every day he 
divided into certain portions, and in each portion devoted himself 



342 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

to a certain pursuit. That he might divide his time exactly, he 
had wax torches or candles made, which were all of the same size, 
were notched across at regular distances, and were always kept 
burning. Thus, as the candles burnt down, he divided the day 
into notches, almost as accurately as we now divide it into hours 
upon the clock. But when the candles were first invented, it was 
found that the wind and draughts of air, blowing into the palace 
through the doors and windows, and through the chinks in the 
walls, caused them to gutter and burn unequally. To prevent 
this, the King had them put into cases formed of wood and white 
horn. And these were the first lanthorns ever made in England. 

All this time, he was afflicted with a terrible unknown disease, 
which caused him violent and frequent pain that nothing could 
relieve. He bore it, as he had borne all the troubles of his life, 
like a brave good man, until he was fifty-three years old ; and then, 
having reigned thirty years, he died. He died in the year nine 
hundred and one ; but, long ago as that is, his fame, and the love 
and gratitude with which his subjects regarded him, are freshly re- 
membered to the present hour. 

In the next reign, which was the reign of Edwaed, surnamed 
The Eldee, who was chosen in council to succeed, a nephew of 
King Alfred troubled the country by trying to obtain the throne. 
The Danes in the East of England took part with this usurper (per- 
haps because they had honoured his uncle so much, and honoured 
him for his uncle's sake), and there was hard fighting; but, the 
King, with the assistance of his sister, gained the day, and reigned 
in peace for four and twenty years. He gradually extended his 
power over the whole of England, and so the Seven Kingdoms were 
united into one. 

When England thus became one kingdom, ruled over by one 
Saxon king, the Saxons had been settled in the country more than 
four hundred and fifty years. Great changes had taken place in 
its customs during that time. The Saxons were still greedy eaters 
and great drinkers, and their feasts were often of a noisy and drunken 
kind; but many new comforts and even elegances had become 
known, and were fast increasing. Hangings for the walls of rooms, 
where, in these modern days, we paste up paper, are known to have 
been sometimes made of silk, ornamented with birds and flowers in 
needlework. Tables and chairs were curiously carved in different 
woods ; were sometimes decorated with gold or silver ; sometimes 
even made of those precious metals. Knives and spoons were used 
at table ; golden ornaments were worn — with silk and cloth, and 
golden tissues and embroideries ; dishes were made of gold and silver, 
brass and bone. There were varieties of drinking-horns, bedsteads, 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 343 

musical instruments. A harp was passed round, at a feast, like the 
drinking-bowl, from guest to guest ; and each one usually sang or 
played when his turn came. The weapons of the Saxons were 
stoutly made, and among them was a terrihle iron hammer that 
gave deadly blows, and was long remembered. The Saxons them- 
selves were a handsome people. The men were proud of their long 
fair hair, parted on the forehead ; their ample beards, their fresh 
complexions, and clear eyes. The beauty of the Saxon women filled 
all England with a new delight and grace. 

I have more to tell of the Saxons yet, but I stop to say this now, 
because under the Geeat Alfred, all the best points of the Eng- 
lish-Saxon character were first encouraged, and in him first shown. 
It has been the greatest character among the nations of the earth. 
Wherever the descendants of the Saxon race have gone, have sailed, 
or otherwise made their way, even to the remotest regions of the 
world, they have been patient, persevering, never to be broken in 
spirit, never to be turned aside from enterprises on which they have 
resolved. In Europe, Asia, Africa, America, the whole world over ; 
in the desert, in the forest, on the sea ; scorched by a burning sun, 
or frozen by ice that never melts ; the Saxon blood remains un- 
changed. Wheresoever that race goes, there, law and industry, 
and safety for life and property, and all the great results of steady 
perseverance, are certain to arise. 

I pause to think with admiration, of the noble king who, in his 
single person, possessed all the Saxon virtues. Whom misfortune 
could not subdue, whom prosperity could not spoil, whose persever- 
ance nothing could shake. Who was hopeful in defeat, and gener- 
ous in success. Who loved justice, freedom, truth, and knowledge. 
Who, in his care to instruct his people, probably did more to pre- 
serve the beautiful old Saxon language, than I can imagine. With- 
out whom, the English tongue in which I tell this story might have 
wanted half its meaning. As it is said that his spirit still inspires 
some of our best English laws, so, let you and I pray that it may 
animate our English hearts, at least to this — to resolve, when we 
see any of our fellow-creatures left in ignorance, that we will do our 
best, while life is in us, to have them taught ; and to tell those 
rulers whose duty it is to teach them, and who neglect their duty, 
that they have profited very little by all the years that have rolled 
away since the year nine hundred and one, and that they are far 
behind the bright example of King Alfred the Great. 



344 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

CHAPTER IV. 

ENGLAND UNDER ATHELSTAN AND THE SIX BOY-KINGS. 

Athelstan, the son of Edward the Elder, succeeded that king. 
He reigned only fifteen years ; but he remembered the glory of his 
grandfather, the great Alfred, and governed England well. He re- 
duced the turbulent people of Wales, and obliged them to pay him 
a tribute in money, and in cattle, and to send him their best hawks 
and hounds. He was victorious over the Cornish men, who were 
not yet quiet under the Saxon government. He restored such of 
the old laws as were good, and had fallen into disuse ; made some 
wise new laws, and took care of the poor and weak. A strong alli- 
ance, made against him by Anlaf a Danish Prince, Constantine 
King of the Scots, and the people of North Wales, he broke and 
defeated in one great battle, long famous for the vast numbers slain 
in it. After that, he had a quiet reign ; the lords and ladies about 
him had leisure to become polite and agreeable ; and foreign princes 
were glad (as they have sometimes been since) to come to England 
on visits to the English court. 

When Athelstan died, at forty-seven years old, his brother 
Edmund, who was only eighteen, became king. He was the first 
of six boy-kings, as you will presently know. 

They called him the Magnificent, because he showed a taste for 
improvement and refinement. But he was beset by the Danes, and 
had a short and troubled reign, which came to a troubled end. One 
night, when he was feasting in his hall, and had eaten much and 
drunk deep, he saw, among the company, a noted robber named 
Leof, who had been banished from England. Made veiy angry by 
the boldness of this man, the King turned to his cup-bearer, and 
said, " There is a robber sitting at the table yonder, who, for his 
crimes, is an outlaw in the land — a hunted wolf, whose life any 
man may take, at any time. Command that robber to depart ! " 
"I will not depart !" said Leof "No? "cried the King. "No, 
by the Lord ! " said Leof. Upon that the King rose from his seat, 
and, making passionately at the robber, and seizing him by his long 
hair, tried to throw him down. But the robber had a dagger un- 
derneath his cloak, and, in the scuffle, stabbed the King to death. 
That done, he set his back against the wall, and fought so desper- 
ately, that although he was soon cut to pieces by the King's armed 
men, and the wall and pavement were splashed with his blood, yet 
it was not before he had killed and wounded many of them. You 
may imagine what rough lives the kings of those times led, when 
one of them could struggle, half drunk, with a public robber in his 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 345 

own dining-hall, and be stabbed in presence of the company who 
ate and drank with him. 

Then succeeded the boy-king Edred, who was weak and sickly 
in body, but of a strong mind. And his armies fought the North- 
men, the Danes, and Norwegians, or the Sea-Kings, as they were 
called, and beat them for the time. And, in nine years, Edred died, 
and passed away. 

Then came the boy-king Edwy, fifteen years of age ; but the real 
king, who had the real power, was a monk named Dunstan — a 
clever priest, a little mad, and not a little proud and cruel. 

Dunstan was then Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, whither the 
body of King Edmund the Magnificent was carried, to be buried. 
While yet a boy, he had got out of his bed one night (being then 
in a fever), and walked about Glastonbury Church when it was 
under repair; and, because he did not tumble off some scaffolds 
that were there, and break his neck, it was reported that he had 
been shown over the building by an angel. He had also made a 
harp that was said to play of itself— which it very likely did, as 
^olian Harps, which are played by the wind, and are understood 
now, always do. For these wonders he had been once denounced 
by his enemies, who were jealous of his favour with the late King 
Athelstan, as a magician ; and he had been waylaid, bound hand 
and foot, and thrown into a marsh. But he got out again, some- 
how, to cause a great deal of trouble yet. 

The priests of those days were, generally, the only scholars. 
They were learned in many things. Having to make their own con- 
vents and monasteries on uncultivated grounds that were granted 
to them by the Crown, it was necessary that they should be good 
farmers and good gardeners, or their lands would have been too poor 
to support them. For the decoration of the chapels where they 
prayed, and for the comfort of the refectories where they ate and 
drank, it was necessary that there should be good carpenters, good 
smiths, good painters, among them. For their greater safety in 
sickness and accident, living alone by themselves in solitary places, 
it was necessary that they should study the virtues of plants and 
herbs, and should know how to dress cuts, burns, scalds, and bruises, 
and how to set broken limbs. Accordingly, they taught themselves, 
and one another, a great variety of useful arts; and became skilful 
in agriculture, medicine, surgery, and handicraft. And when they 
wanted the aid of any little piece of machineiy, which would be 
simple enough now, but was marvellous then, to impose a trick upon 
the poor peasants, they knew very well how to make it ; and did 
make it many a time and often, I have no doubt. 

Dunstan, Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, was one of the most saga- 



346 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

cious of these monks. He was an ingenious smith, and worked at 
a forge in a little cell. This cell was made too short to admit of 
his lying at full length when he went to sleep — as if that did any- 
good to anybody ! — and he used to tell the most extraordinary lies 
about demons and spirits, who, he said, came there to persecute 
him. For instance, he related that one day when he was at work, 
the devil looked in at the little window, and tried to tempt him to 
lead a life of idle pleasure ; whereupon, having his pincers in the 
fire, red hot, he seized the devil by the nose, and put him to such 
pain, that his bellowings were heard for miles and miles. Some 
people are inclined to think this nonsense a part of Dunstan's mad- 
ness (for his head never quite recovered the fever), but I think not. 
I observe that it induced the ignorant people to consider him a 
holy man, and that it made him very powerful. Which was 
exactly what he always wanted. 

On the day of the coronation of the handsome boy-king Edwy, 
it was remarked by Odo, Archbishop of Canterbury (who was a 
Dane by birth), that the King quietly left the coronation feast, 
while all the company were there. Odo, much displeased, sent his 
friend Dunstan to seek him. Dunstan finding him in the company 
of his beautiful young wife Elgiva, and her mother Ethelgiva, 
a good and virtuous lady, not only grossly abused them, but 
dragged the young King back into the feasting-hall by force. 
Some, again, think Dunstan did this because the young King's fair 
wife was his own cousin, and the monks objected to people marry- 
ing their own cousins ; but I believe he did it, because he was an 
imperious, audacious, ill-conditioned priest, w^ho, having loved a 
young lady himself before he became a sour monk, hated all love 
now, and everything belonging to it. 

The young King was quite old enough to feel this insult. Dun- 
stan had been Treasurer in the last reign, and he soon charged 
Dunstan with having taken some of the last king's money. The 
Glastonbury Abbot fled to Belgium (very narrowly escaping some 
pursuers who were sent to put out his eyes, as you will wish they 
had, when you read what follows), and his abbey was given to 
priests who were married ; whom he always, both before and after- 
wards, opposed. But he quickly conspired with his friend, Odo the 
Dane, to set up the King's young brother, Edgar, as his rival for 
the throne ; and, not content with this revenge, he caused the beau- 
tiful queen Elgiva, though a lovely girl of only seventeen or eighteen, 
to be stolen from one of the Eoyal Palaces, branded in the cheek 
with a red-hot iron, and sold into slavery in Ireland. But the 
Irish people pitied and befriended her ; and they said, " Let us re- 
store the girl-queen to the boy-king, and make the young lovers 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OP ENGLAND. 847 

happy ! " and they cured her of her cruel wound, and sent her 
home as beautiful as before. But the villain Dunstan, and that 
other villain, Odo, caused her to be waylaid at Gloucester as she 
was joyfully hurrying to join her husband, and to be hacked and 
hewn with swords, and to be barbarously maimed and lamed, and 
left to die. When Edwy the Fair (his people called him so, be- 
cause he was so young and handsome) heard of her dreadful fate, 
he died of a broken heart ; and so the pitiful story of the poor 
young wife and husband ends ! Ah ! Better to be two cottagers 
in these better times, than king and queen of England in those bad 
days, though never so fair ! 

Then came the boy-king, Edgar, called the Peaceful, fifteen 
years old. Dunstan, being still the real king, drove all married 
priests out of the monasteries and abbeys, and replaced them by 
solitary monks like himself, of the rigid order called the Benedic- 
tines. He made himself Archbishop of Canterbury, for his greater 
glory ; and exercised such power over the neighbouring British 
princes, and so collected them about the King, that once, when the 
King held his court at Chester, and went on the river Dee to visit 
the monastery of St. John, the eight oars of his boat were pulled 
(as the people used to delight in relating in stories and songs) by 
eight crowned kings, and steered by the King of England. As 
Edgar was very obedient to Dunstan and the monks, they took 
great pains to represent him as the best of kings. But he was 
really profligate, debauched, and vicious. He once forcibly carried 
off a young lady from the convent at Wilton ; and Dunstan, pre- 
tending to be very much shocked, condemned him not to wear his 
crown upon his head for seven years — no great punishment, I 
dare say, as it can hardly have been a more comfortable ornament 
to wear, than a stewpan without a handle. His marriage with his 
second wife, Elfrida, is one of the worst events of his reign. 
Hearing of the beauty of this lady, he despatched his favourite 
courtier, Athelwold, to her father's castle in Devonshire, to see 
if she were really as charming as fame reported. Now, she was so 
exceedingly beautiful that Athelwold fell in love with her himself, 
and married her ; but he told the King that she was only rich — 
not handsome. The King, suspecting the truth when they came 
home, resolved to pay the newly-married couple a visit ; and, sud- 
denly, told Athelwold to prepare for his immediate coming. Ath- 
elwold, terrified, confessed to his young wife what he had said and 
done, and implored her to disguise her beauty by some ugly dress 
or silly manner, that he might be safe from the King's anger. She 
promised that she would ; but she was a proud woman, who would 
far rather have been a queen than the wife of a courtier. She 



348 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

dressed herself in her best dress, and adorned herself with her rich- 
est jewels ; and when the King came, presently, he discovered the 
cheat. So, he caused his false friend, Athelwold, to be murdered 
in a wood, and married his widow, this bad Elfrida. Six or seven 
years afterwards, he died ; and was buried, as if he had been all 
that the monks said he was, in the abbey of Glastonbury, which 
he — or Dunstan for him — had much enriched. 

England, in one part of this reign, was so troubled by wolves, 
which, driven out of the open country, hid themselves in the moun- 
tains of Wales when they were not attacking travellers and animals, 
that the tribute payable by the Welsh people was forgiven them, 
on condition of their producing, every year, three hundred wolves' 
heads. And the Welshmen were so sharp upon the wolves, to 
save their money, that in four years there was not a wolf left. 

Then came the boy-king, Edward, called the Martyr, from the 
manner of his death. Elfrida had a son, named Ethelred, for 
whom she claimed the throne ; but Dunstan did not choose to fa- 
vour him, and he made Edward king. The boy was hunting, one 
day, down in Dorsetshire, when he rode near to Corfe Castle, 
where Elfrida and Ethelred lived. Wishing to see them kindly, he 
rode away from his attendants and galloped to the castle gate, 
where he arrived at twilight, and blew his hunting-horn. " Yoa 
are welcome, dear King," said Elfrida, coming out, with her bright- 
est smiles. "Pray you dismount and enter." "Not so, dear 
madam," said the King. "My company will miss me, and fear 
that I have met with some harm. Please you to give me a cup of 
wine, that I may drink here, in the saddle, to you and to my little 
brother, and so ride away with the good speed I have made in rid- 
ing here." Elfrida, going in to bring the wine, whispered an 
armed servant, one of her attendants, who stole out of the darken- 
ing gateway, and crept round behind the King's horse. As the 
King raised the cup to his lips, saying, " Health ! " to the wicked 
woman who was smiling on him, and to his innocent brother whose 
hand she held in hers, and who was only ten years old, this armed 
man made a spring and stabbed him in the back. He dropped the 
cup and spurred his horse awaj ; but, soon fainting with loss of 
blood, drooped from the saddle, and, in his fall, entangled one of 
his feet in the stirrup. The frightened horse dashed on ; trailing 
his rider's curls upon the ground ; dragging his smooth young face 
through ruts, and stones, and briers, and fallen leaves, and mud ; 
until the hunters, tracking the animal's course by the King's blood, 
caught his bridle, and released the disfigured body. 

Then came the sixth and last of the boy-kings, Ethelred, whom 
Elfrida, when he cried out at the sight of his murdered brother 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 349 

riding away from the castle gate, unmercifully beat with a torch 
which she snatched from one of the attendants. The people so dis- 
liked this boy, on account of his cruel mother and the murder she 
had done to promote him, that Dunstan would not have had him 
for king, but would have made Edgitha, the daughter of the dead 
King Edgar, and of the lady whom he stole out of the convent at 
Wilton, Queen of England, if she would have consented. But she 
knew the stories of the youthful kings too well, and would not be 
persuaded from the convent where she lived in peace ; so, Dunstan 
put Ethelred on the throne, having no one else to put there, and 
gave him the nickname of The Unready — knowing that he 
wanted resolution and firmness. 

At first, Elfrida possessed great influence over the young King, 
but, as he grew older and came of age, her influence declined. The 
infamous woman, not having it in her power to do any more evil, 
then retired from court, and, according to the fashion of the time, 
built churches and monasteries, to expiate her guilt. As if a 
church, with a steeple reaching to the very stars, would have 
been any sign of true repentance for the blood of the poor boy, 
whose murdered form was trailed at his horse's heels ! As if she 
could have buried her wickedness beneath the senseless stones of 
the whole world, piled up one upon another, for the monks to 
live in ! 

About the ninth or tenth year of this reign, Dunstan died. He 
was growing old then, but was as stern and artful as ever. Two 
circumstances that happened in connection with him, in this reign of 
Ethelred, made a great noise. Once, he was present at a meeting 
of the Church, when the question was discussed whether priests 
should have permission to marry; and, as he sat with his head 
hung down, apparently thinking about it, a voice seemed to come 
out of a crucifix in the room, and warn the meeting to be of his opin- 
ion. This was some juggling of Dunstan's, and was probably his 
own voice disguised. But he played off a worse juggle than that, 
soon afterwards ; for, another meeting being held on the same sub- 
ject, and he and his supporters being seated on one side of a great 
room, and their opponents on the other, he rose and said, " To 
Christ Himself, as Judge, do I commit this cause ! " Immediately 
on these words being spoken, the floor where the opposite party 
sat gave way, and some were killed and many wounded. You may 
be pretty sure that it had been weakened under Dunstan's direction, 
and that it fell at Dunstan's signal. His part of the floor did not 
go down. No, no. He was too good a workman for that. 

When he died, the monks settled that he was a Saint, and called 
him Saint Dunstan ever afterwards. They might just as well have 



350 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

settled that he was a coach-horse, and could just as easily have 
called him one, 

Ethelred the Unready was glad enough, I dare say, to be rid of 
this holy saint ; but, left to himself, he was a poor weak king, and 
his reign was a reign of defeat and shame. The restless Danes, led 
by SwEYN, a son of the King of Denmark who had quarrelled with 
his father and had been banished from home, again came into Eng- 
land, and, year after year, attacked and despoiled large towns. To 
coax these sea-kings away, the weak Ethelred paid them money ; 
but, the more money he paid, the more money the Danes wanted. 
At first, he gave them ten thousand pounds ; on their next invasion, 
sixteen thousand pounds ; on their next invasion, four and twenty 
thousand pounds : to pay which large sums, the unfortunate Eng- 
lish people were heavily taxed. But, as the Danes still came back 
and wanted more, he thought it would be a good plan to marry 
into some powerful foreign family that would help him with sol- 
diers. So, in the year one thousand and two, he courted and mar- 
ried Emma, the sister of Richard Duke of Normandy ; a lady who 
was called the Flower of Normandy. 

And now, a terrible deed was done in England, the like of which 
was never done on English ground before or since. On the thir- 
teenth of November, in pursuance of secret instructions sent by the 
King over the whole country, the inhabitants of every town and 
city armed, and murdered all the Danes who were their neighbours. 
Young and old, babies and soldiers, men and women, every Dane 
was killed. No doubt there were among them many ferocious men 
who had done the English great wrong, and whose pride and inso- 
lence, in swaggering in the houses of the English and insulting their 
wives and daughters, had become unbearable ; but no doubt there 
were also among them many peaceful Christian Danes who had mar- 
ried English women and become like English men. They were all 
slain, even to Gunhilda, the sister of the King of Denmark, mar- 
ried to an English lord ; who was first obliged to see the murder of 
her husband and her child, and then was killed herself. 

When the King of the sea-kings heard of this deed of blood, he 
swore that he would have a great revenge. He raised an army, 
and a mightier fleet of ships than ever yet had sailed to England ; 
and in all his army there was not a slave or an old man, but every 
soldier was a free man, and the son of a free man, and in the prime 
of life, and sworn to be revenged upon the English nation, for the 
massacre of that dread thirteenth of November, when his country- 
men and countrywomen, and the little children whom they loved, 
were killed with fire and sword. And so, the sea-kings came to 
England in many great ships, each bearing the flag of its own com- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 351 

mander. Golden eagles, ravens, dragons, dolphins, beasts of prey, 
threatened England from the prows of those ships, as they came 
onward through the water ; and were reflected in the shining 
shields that hung upon their sides. The ship that bore the stand- 
ard of the King of the sea-kings was carved and painted like a 
mighty serpent ; and the King in his anger prayed that the Gods 
in whom he trusted might all desert him, if his serpent did not 
strike its fangs into England's heart. 

And indeed it did. For, the great army landing from the great 
fleet, near Exeter, went forward, laying England waste, and strik- 
ing their lances in the earth as they advanced, or throwing them 
into rivers, in token of their making all the island theirs. In re- 
membrance of the black November night when the Danes were 
murdered, wheresoever the invaders came, they made the Saxons 
prepare and spread for them great feasts ; and when they had eaten 
those feasts, and had drunk a curse to England with wild rejoicings, 
they drew their swords, and killed their Saxon entertainers, and 
marched on. For six long years they carried on this war : burning 
the crops, farmhouses, barns, mills, granaries ; killing the labourers 
in the fields ; preventing the seed from being sown in the ground ; 
causing famine and starvation; leaving only heaps of ruin and 
smoking ashes, where they had found rich towns. To crown this 
misery, English ofl&cers and men deserted, and even the favourites 
of Ethelred the Unready, becoming traitors, seized many of the 
English ships, turned pirates against their own country, and aided 
by a storm occasioned the loss of nearly the whole English navy. 

There was but one man of note, at this miserable pass, who was 
true to his country and the feeble King. He was a priest, and a 
brave one. For twenty days, the Archbishop of Canterbury de- 
fended that city against its Danish besiegers ; and when a traitor 
in the town threw the gates open and admitted them, he said, in 
chains, " I will not buy my life with money that must be extorted 
from the suffering people. Do with me what you please ! " Again 
and again, he steadily refused to purchase his release with gold 
wrung from the poor. 

At last, the Danes being tired of this, and being assembled at a 
dnmken merrymaking, had him brought into the feasting-hall. 

" Now, bishop," they said, "we want gold ! " 

He looked round on the crowd of angry faces : from the shaggy 
beards close to him, to the shaggy beards against the walls, where 
men were mounted on tables and forms to see him over the heads 
of others : and he knew that his time was come. 

" I have no gold," said he. 

" Get it, bishop ! " they all thundered. 



352 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

" That, I have often told you I will not," said he. 

They gathered closer round him, threatening, but he stood un- 
moved. Then, one man struck him ; then, another ; then a curs- 
ing soldier picked up from a heap in a corner of the hall, where 
fragments had been rudely thrown at dinner, a great ox-bone, and 
cast it at his face, from which the blood came spurting forth ; 
then, others ran to the same heap, and knocked him down with 
other bones, and bruised and battered him ; until one soldier whom 
he had baptised (willing, as I hope for the sake of that soldier's 
soul, to shorten the sufferings of the good man) struck him dead 
with his battle-axe. 

If Ethelred had had the heart to emulate the courage of this 
noble archbishop, he might have done something yet. But he paid 
the Danes forty-eight thousand pounds, instead, and gained so little 
by the cowardly act, that Sweyn soon afterwards came over to 
subdue all England. So broken was the attachment of the Eng- 
lish people, by this time, to their incapable King and their forlorn 
country which could not protect them, that they welcomed Sweyn 
on all sides, as a deliverer. London faithfully stood out, as long 
as the King was within its walls ; but, when he sneaked away, it 
also welcomed the Dane. Then, all was over ; and the King took 
refuge abroad with the Duke of Normandy, who had already given 
shelter to the King's wife, once the Flower of that country, and to 
her children. 

Still, the English people, in spite of their sad sufferings, could 
not quite forget the great King Alfred and the Saxon race. When 
Sweyn died suddenly, in little more than a month after he had been 
proclaimed King of England, they generously sent to Ethelred, to 
say that they would have him for their King again, "if he would 
only govern them better than he had governed them before." The 
Unready, instead of coming himself, sent Edward, one of his sons, 
to make promises for him. At last, he followed, and the English 
declared him King. The Danes declared Canute, the son of 
Sweyn, King. Thus, direful war begaii again, and lasted for three 
years, when the Unready died. And I know of nothing better 
that he did, in all his reign of eight and thirty years. 

Was Canute to be King now 1 Not over the Saxons, they said ; 
they must have Edmund, one of the sons of the Unready, who was 
surnamed Ironside, because of his strength and stature. Edmund 
and Canute thereupon fell to, and fought five battles — unhappy 
England, what a fighting-ground it was — and then Ironside, who 
was a big man, proposed to Canute, who was a little man, that 
they two should fight it out in single combat. If Canute had been 
the big man, he would probably have said yes, but, being the little 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 353 

man, he decidedly said no. However, he declared that he was 
willing to divide the kingdom — to take all that lay north of Wat- 
ling Street, as the old Roman military road from Dover to Chester 
was called, and to give Ironside all that lay south of it. Most 
men being weary of so much bloodshed, this was done. But Ca- 
nute soon became sole King of England ; for Ironside died suddenly 
within two months. Some think that he was killed, and killed by 
Canute's orders. No one knows. 



CHAPTER V. 

ENGLAND UNDER CANUTE THE DANE. 

Canute reigned eighteen years. He was a merciless King at 
first. After he had clasped the hands of the Saxon chiefs, in token 
of the sincerity with which he swore to be just and good to them 
in return for their acknowledging him, he denounced and slew many 
of them, as well as many relations of the late King. " He who 
brings me the head of one of my enemies," he used to say, " shall 
be dearer to me than a brother." And he was so severe in hunt- 
ing down his enemies, that he must have got together a pretty 
large family of these dear brothers. He was strongly inclined to 
kill Edmund and Edward, two children, sons of poor Ironside; 
but, being afraid to do so in England, he sent them over to the 
King of Sweden, with a request that the King would be so good 
as " dispose of them." If the King of Sweden had been like 
many, many other men of that day, he would have had their in- 
nocent throats cut ; but he was a kind man, and brought them up 
tenderly. 

Normandy ran much in Canute's mind. In Normandy were the 
two children of the late King — Edward and Alfred by name; 
and their uncle the Duke might one day claim the crown for them. 
But the Duke showed so little inclination to do so now, that he 
proposed to Canute to marry his sister, the widow of The Unready ; 
who, being but a showy flower, and caring for nothing so much as 
becoming a queen again, left her children and was wedded to him. 

Successful and triumphant, assisted by the valour of the English 
in his foreign wars, and with little strife to trouble him at home, 
Canute had a prosperous reign, and made many improvements. 
He was a poet and a musician. He grew sorry, as he grew older, 
for the blood he had shed at first ; and went to Rome in a Pilgrim's 
dress, by way of washing it out. He gave a great deal of money 
to foreigners on his journey; but he took it from the English 
2a 



354 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

before he started. On the whole, however, he certainly became a 
far better man when he had no opposition to contend with, and 
was as great a King as England had known for some time. 

The old writers of history relate how that Canute was one day 
disgusted with his courtiers for their flattery, and how he caused 
his chair to be set on the sea-shore, and feigned to command the 
tide as it came up not to wet the edge of his robe, for the land 
was his ; how the tide came up, of course, without regarding him ; 
and how he then turned to his flatterers, and rebuked them, saying, 
what was the might of any earthly king, to the might of the 
Creator, who could say unto the sea, " Thus far shalt thou go, and 
no farther ! " We may learn from this, I think, that a little sense 
will go a long way in a king; and that courtiers are not easily 
cured of flattery, nor kings of a liking for it. If the courtiers of 
Canute had not known, long before, that the King was fond of 
flattery, they would have known better than to oflfer it in such 
large doses. And if they had not known that he was vain of this 
speech (anything but a wonderful speech it seems to me, if a good 
child had made it), they would not have been at such great pains 
to repeat it. I fancy I see them all on the sea-shore together ; the 
King's chair sinking in the sand; the King in a mighty good 
humour with his own wisdom ; and the courtiers pretending to be 
quite stunned by it ! 

It is not the sea alone that is bidden to go " thus far, and no 
farther." The great command goes forth to all the kings upon the 
earth, and went to Canute in the year one thousand and thirty-five, 
and stretched him dead upon his bed. Beside it, stood his Norman 
wife. Perhaps, as the King looked his last upon her, he, who had 
so often thought distrustfully of Normandy, long ago, thought once 
more of the two exiled Princes in their uncle's court, and of the little 
favour they could feel for either Danes or Saxons, and of a rising 
cloud in Normandy that slowly moved towards England. 



CHAPTER VI. 

ENGLAND UNDER HAROLD HAREFOOT, HARDICANUTE, AND EDWARD 
THE CONFESSOR. 

Canute left three sons, by name Sweyn, Harold, and Hardi- 
canute; but his Queen, Emma, once the Flower of Normandy, 
was the mother of only Hardicanute. Canute had wished his do- 
minions to be divided between the three, and had wished Harold 
to have England ; but the Saxon people in the South of England, 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 355 

headed by a nobleman with great possessions, called the powerful 
Earl Godwin (who is said to have been originally a poor cow-boy), 
opposed this, and desired to have, instead, either Hardicanute, or 
one of the two exiled Princes who were over in Normandy. It 
seemed so certain that there would be more bloodshed to settle this 
dispute, that many people left their homes, and took refuge in the 
woods and swamps. Happily, however, it was agreed to refer the 
whole question to a great meeting at Oxford, which decided that 
Harold should have all the country north of the Thames, with Lon- 
don for his capital city, and that Hardicanute should have all the 
south. The quarrel was so arranged ; and, as Hardicanute was in 
Denmark troubling himself very little about anything but eating 
and getting drunk, his mother and Earl Godwin governed the south 
for him. 

They had hardly begun to do so, and the trembling people who 
had hidden themselves were scarcely at home again, when Edward, 
the elder of the two exiled Princes, came over from Normandy with 
a few followers, to claim the Enghsh Crown. His mother Emma, 
however, who only cared for her last son Hardicanute, instead of 
assisting him, as he expected, opposed him so strongly with all her 
influence that he was very soon glad to get safely back. His brother 
Alfred was not so fortunate. Believing in an affectionate letter, 
written some time afterwards to him and his brother, in his mother's 
name (but whether really with or without his mother's knowledge 
is now uncertain), he allowed himself to be tempted over to Eng- 
land, with a good force of soldiers, and landing on the Kentish 
coast, and being met and welcomed by Earl Godwin, proceeded into 
Surrey, as far as the town of Guildford. Here, he and his men halted 
in the evening to rest, having still the Earl in their company ; who 
had ordered lodgings and good cheer for them. But, in the dead of 
the night, when they were off their guard, being divided into small 
parties sleeping soundly after a long march and a plentiful supper 
in different houses, they were set upon by the King's troops, and 
taken prisoners. Next morning they were drawn out in a line, 
to the number of six hundred men, and were barbarously tortured 
and killed ; with the exception of every tenth man, who was sold 
into slavery. As to the wretched Prince Alfred, he was stripped 
naked, tied to a horse and sent away into the Isle of Ely, where his 
eyes were torn out of his head, and where in a few days he miser- 
ably died. I am not sure that the Earl had wilfully entrapped 
him, but I suspect it strongly. 

Harold was now King all over England, though it is doubtful 
whether the Archbishop of Canterbury (the greater part of the 
priests were Saxons, and not friendly to the Danes) ever consented 



356 A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 

to crown him. Crowned or uncrowned, with the Archbishop's leave 
or without it, he was King for four years : after which short reign 
he died, and was buried ; having never done much in life but go 
a hunting. He was such a fast runner at this, his favourite sport, 
that the people called him Harold Harefoot. 

Hardicanute was then at Bruges, in Flanders, plotting, with his 
mother (who had gone over there after the cruel murder of Prince 
Alfred), for the invasion of England. The Danes and Saxons, find- 
ing themselves without a King, and dreading new disputes, made 
common cause, and joined in inviting him to occupy the Throne. 
He consented, and soon troubled them enough ; for he brought over 
numbers of Danes, and taxed the people so insupportably to enrich 
those greedy favourites that there were many insurrections, espe- 
cially one at Worcester, where the citizens rose and killed his tax- 
collectors ; in revenge for which he burned their city. He was a 
brutal King, whose first public act was to order the dead body of 
poor Harold Harefoot to be dug up, beheaded, and thrown into the 
river. His end was worthy of such a beginning. He fell down 
drunk, with a goblet of wine in his hand, at a wedding-feast at 
Lambeth, given in honour of the marriage of his standard-bearer, a 
Dane named Towed the Peoud. And he never spoke again. 

Edward, afterwards called by the monks The Confessor, suc- 
ceeded ; and his first act was to oblige his mother Emma, who had 
favoured him so little, to retire into the country ; where she died 
some ten years afterwards. He was the exiled prince whose brother 
Alfred had been so foully killed. He had been invited over from 
Normandy by Hardicanute, in the course of his short reign of two 
years, and had been handsomely treated at court. His cause was 
now favoured by the powerful Earl Godwin, and he was soon made 
King. This Earl had been suspected by the people, ever since 
Prince Alfred's cruel death ; he had even been tried in the last 
reign for the Prince's murder, but had been pronounced not guilty ; 
chiefly, as it was supposed, because of a present he had made to 
the swinish King, of a gilded ship with a figure-head of solid gold, 
and a crew of eighty splendidly armed men. It was his interest to 
help the new King with his power, if the new King would help 
him against the popular distrust and hatred. So they made a bar- 
gain. Edward the Confessor got the Throne. The Earl got more 
power and more land, and his daughter Editha was made queen ; 
for it was a part of their compact that the King should take her 
for his wife. 

But, although she was a gentle lady, in all things worthy to be 
beloved — good, beautiful, sensible, and kind — the King from the 
first neglected her. Her father and her six proud brothers, resent- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 357 

ing this cold treatment, harassed the King greatly by exerting all 
their power to make him unpopular. Having lived so long in 
Normandy, he preferred the Normans to the English. He made 
a Norman Archbishop, and Norman Bishops ; his great officers and 
favourites were all Normans ; he introduced the Norman fashions 
and the Norman language ; in imitation of the state custom of 
Normandy, he attached a great seal to his state documents, instead 
of merely marking them, as the Saxon Kings had done, with the 
sign of the cross — just as poor people who have never been taught 
to write, now make the same mark for their names. All this, the 
powerful Earl Godwin and his six proud sons represented to the 
people as disfavour shown towards the English ; and thus they 
daily increased their own power, and daily diminished the power 
of the King. 

They were greatly helped by an event that occurred when he had 
reigned eight years. Eustace, Earl of Boulogne, who had married 
the King's sister, came to England on a visit. After staying at 
the court some time, he set forth, with his numerous train of attend- 
ants, to return home. They were to embark at Dover. Entering 
that peaceful town in armour, they took possession of the best 
houses, and noisily demanded to be lodged and entertained without 
payment. One of the bold men of Dover, who would not endure 
to have these domineering strangers jingling their heavy swords 
and iron corselets up and down his house, eating his meat, and 
drinking liis strong liquor, stood in his doorway and refused admis- 
sion to the first armed man who came there. The armed man 
drew, and wounded him. The man of Dover struck the armed 
man dead. Intelligence of what he had done, spreading through 
the streets to where the Count Eustace and his men were standing 
by their horses, bridle in hand, they passionately mounted, galloped 
to the house, surrounded it, forced their way in (the doors and 
windows being closed when they came up), and killed the man of 
Dover at his own fireside. They then clattered through the streets, 
cutting down and riding over men, women, and children. This did 
not last long, you may believe. The men of Dover set upon them 
with great fury, killed nineteen of the foreigners, wounded many 
more, and, blockading the road to the port so that they should 
not embark, beat them out of the town by the way they had 
come. Hereupon, Count Eustace rides as hard as man can ride to 
Gloucester, where Edward is, surrounded by Norman monks and 
Norman lords. "Justice!" cries the Count, "upon the men of 
Dover, who have set upon and slain my people ! " The King sends 
immediately for the powerful Earl Godwin, who happens to be 
near : reminds him that Dover is under his government ; and 



358 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

orders him to repair to Dover and do military execution on the 
inhabitants. "It does not become yon," says the proud Earl in 
reply, " to condemn without a hearing those whom you have sworn 
to protect. I will not do it." 

The King, therefore, summoned the Earl, on pain of banishment 
and loss of his titles and property, to appear before the court to 
answer this disobedience. The Earl refused to appear. He, his 
eldest son Harold, and his second son Sweyn, hastily raised as many 
fighting men as their utmost power could collect, and demanded to 
have Count Eustace and his followers surrendered to the justice of 
the country. The King, in his turn, refused to give them up, and 
raised a strong force. After some treaty and delay, the troops 
of the great Earl and his sons began to fall off. The Earl, with a 
part of his family and abundance of treasure, sailed to Flanders ; 
Harold escaped to Ireland ; and the power of the great family was 
for that time gone in England. But, the people did not forget 
them. 

Then, Edward the Confessor, with the true meanness of a mean 
spirit, visited his dislike of the once powerful father and sons upon 
the helpless daughter and sister, his unoffending wife, whom all 
who saw her (her husband and his monks excepted) loved. He 
seized rapaciously upon her fortune and her jewels, and allowing 
her only one attendant, confined her in a gloomy convent, of which 
a sister of his — no doubt an unpleasant lady after his own heart 
— was abbess or jailer. 

Having got Earl Godwin and his six sons well out of his way, 
the King favoured the Normans more than ever. He invited over 
William, Duke of Normandy, the son of that Duke who had 
received him and his murdered brother long ago, and of a peasant 
girl, a tanner's daughter, with whom that Duke had fallen in love 
for her beauty as he saw her washing clothes in a brook. William, 
who was a great warrior, with a passion for fine horses, dogs, and 
arms, accepted the invitation ; and the Normans in England, find- 
ing themselves more numerous than ever when he arrived with his 
retinue, and held in still greater honour at court than before, be- 
came more and more haughty towards the people, and were more 
and more disliked by them. 

The old Earl Godwin, though he was abroad, knew well how the 
people felt ; for, with part of the treasure he had carried away 
with him, he kept spies and agents in his pay all over England. 
Accordingly, he thought the time was come for fitting out a great 
expedition against the Norman-loving King. With it, he sailed to 
the Isle of Wight, where he was joined by his son Harold, the most 
gallant and brave of all his family. And so the father and son 



A CHILD'S HISTOEY OF ENGLAND. 359 

' came sailing up the Thames to Southwark ; great numbers of the 
people declaring for them, and shouting for the English Earl and 
the English Harold, against the Norman favourites ! 

The King was at first as blind and stubborn as kings usually 
have been whensoever they have been in the hands of monks. But 
the people rallied so thickly round the old Earl and his son, and 
the old Earl was so steady in demanding without bloodshed the 
restoration of himself and his family to their rights, that at last 
the court took the alarm. The Norman Archbishop of Canterbury, 
and the Norman Bishop of London, surrounded by their retainers, 
fought their way out of London, and escaped from Essex to France 
in a fishing-boat. The other Norman favourites dispersed in all 
directions. The old Earl and his sons (except Sweyn, who had 
committed crimes against the law) were restored to their posses- 
sions and dignities. Editha, the virtuous and lovely Queen of the 
insensible King, was triumphantly released from her prison, the con- 
vent, and once more sat in her chair of state, arrayed in the jewels 
of which, when she had no champion to support her rights, her 
cold-blooded husband had deprived her. 

The old Earl Godwin did not long enjoy his restored fortune. 
He fell down in a fit at the King's table, and died upon the third 
day afterwards. Harold succeeded to his power, and to a far 
higher place in the attachment of the people than his father had 
ever held. By his valour he subdued the King's enemies in many 
bloody fights. He was vigorous against rebels in Scotland — this 
was the time when Macbeth slew Duncan, upon which event our 
English Shakespeare, hundreds of years afterwards, wrote his great 
tragedy; and he killed the restless Welsh King Griffith, and 
brought his head to England. 

What Harold was doing at sea, when he was driven on the French 
coast by a tempest, is not at all certain ; nor does it at all matter. 
That his ship was forced by a storm on that shore, and that he was 
taken prisoner, there is no doubt. In those barbarous days, all 
shipwrecked strangers were taken prisoners, and obliged to pay 
ransom. So, a certain Count Guy, who was the Lord of Ponthieu 
where Harold's disaster happened, seized him, instead of relieving 
him like a hospitable and Christian lord as he ought to have done, 
and expected to make a very good thing of it. 

But Harold sent off immediately to Duke William of Normandy, 
complaining of this treatment ; and the Duke no sooner heard of 
it than he ordered Harold to be escorted to the ancient town of 
Rouen, where he then was, and where he received him as an 
honoured guest. Now, some writers tell us that Edward the Con- 
fessor, who was by this time old and had no children, had made a 



360 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

will, appointing Duke William of Normandy his successor, and had 
informed the Duke of his having done so. There is no doubt that 
he was anxious about his successor ; because he had even invited 
over, from abroad, Edwakd the Outlaw, a son of Ironside, who 
had come to England with his wife and three children, but whom 
the King had strangely refused to see when he did come, and who 
had died in London suddenly (princes were terribly liable to sudden 
death in those days), and had been buried in St. Paul's Cathedral. 
The King might possibly have made such a will ; or, having always 
been fond of the Normans, he might have encouraged Norman 
William to aspire to the English crown, by something that he said 
to him when he was staying at the English court. But, certainly 
William did now aspire to it ; and knowing that Harold would 
be a powerful rival, he called together a great assembly of his 
nobles, offered Harold his daughter Adele in marriage, informed 
him that he meant on King Edward's death to claim the English 
crown as his own inheritance, and required Harold then and there 
to swear to aid him. Harold, being in the Duke's power, took 
this oath upon the Missal, or Prayer-book. It is a good example 
of the superstitions of the monks, that this Missal, instead of being 
placed upon a table, was placed upon a tub ; which, when Harold 
had sworn, was uncovered, and shown to be full of dead men's 
bones — bones, as the monks pretended, of saints. This was sup- 
posed to make Harold's oath a great deal more impressive and 
binding. As if the great name of the Creator of Heaven and earth 
could be made more solemn by a knuckle-bone, or a double-tooth, 
or a finger-nail, of Dunstan ! 

Within a week or two after Harold's return to England, the 
dreary old Confessor was found to be dying. After wandering in 
his mind like a very weak old man, he died. As he had put him- 
self entirely in the hands of the monks when he was alive, they 
praised him lustily when he was dead. They had gone so far, al- 
ready, as to persuade him that he could work miracles ; and had 
brought people afflicted with a bad disorder of the skin, to him, to 
be touched and cured. This was called " touching for the King's 
Evil," which afterwards became a royal custom. You know, how- 
ever. Who really touched the sick, and healed them ; and you 
know His sacred name is not among the dusty line of human kings. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 361 



CHAPTER VII. 

ENGLAND UNDER HAROLD THE SECOND, AND CONQUERED BY 
THE NORMANS. 

Harold was crowned King of England on the very day of the 
maudlin Confessor's funeral. He had good need to be quick about 
it. When the news reached Norman William, hunting in his park 
at Rouen, he dropped his bow, returned to his palace, called his 
nobles to council, and presently sent ambassadors to Harold, calling 
on him to keep his oath and resign the Crown. Harold would do 
no such thing. The barons of France leagued together round Duke 
William for the invasion of England. Duke William promised 
freely to distribute English wealth and English lands among them. 
The Pope sent to Normandy a consecrated banner, and a ring con- 
taining a hair which he warranted to have grown on the head of 
Saint Peter. He blessed the enterprise ; and cursed Harold ; and 
requested that the Normans would pay " Peter's Pence " — or a 
tax to himself of a penny a year on every house — a little more 
regularly in future, if they could make it convenient. 

King Harold had a rebel brother in Flanders, who was a vassal 
of Harold Hardrada, King of Norway. This brother, and this 
Norwegian King, joining their forces against England, with Duke 
William's help, won a fight in which the English were commanded 
by two nobles ; and then besieged York. Harold, who was waiting 
for the Normans on the coast at Hastings, with his army, marched 
to Stamford Bridge upon the river Derwent to give them instant 
battle. 

He found them drawn up in a hollow circle, marked out by their 
shining spears. Riding round this circle at a distance, to survey 
it, he saw a brave figure on horseback, in a blue mantle and a bright 
helmet, whose horse suddenly stumbled and threw him. 

" Who is that man who has fallen 1 " Harold asked of one of his 
captains. 

" The King of Norway," he replied. 

"He is a tall and stately king," said Harold, "but his end is 
near." 

He added, in a little while, " Go yonder to my brother, and tell 
him, if he withdraw his troops, he shall be Earl of Northumberland, 
and rich and powerful in England." 

The captain rode away and gave the message. 

" What will he give to my friend the King of Norway 1 " asked 
the brother. 

" Seven feet of earth for a grave," replied the captain. 



362 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

" No more ? " returned the brother, with a smile. 

" The King of Norway being a tall man, perhaps a little more," 
replied the captain. 

" Ride back ! " said the brother, " and tell King Harold to make 
ready for the fight ! " 

He did so, very soon. And such a fight King Harold led against 
that force, that his brother, and the Norwegian King, and every 
chief of note in all their host, except the Norwegian King's son 
Clave, to whom he gave honourable dismissal, were left dead upon 
the field. The victorious army marched to York. As King Har- 
old sat there at the feast, in the midst of all his company, a stir 
was heard at the doors ; and messengers all covered with mire from 
riding far and fast through broken ground came hurrying in, to 
report that the Normans had landed in England. 

The intelligence was true. They had been tossed about by con- 
trary winds, and some of their ships had been wrecked. A part of 
their own shore, to whicli they had been driven back, was strewn 
with Norman bodies. But they had once more made sail, led by 
the Duke's own galley, a present from his wife, upon the prow 
whereof the figure of a golden boy stood pointing towards England. 
By day, the banner of the three Lions of Normandy, the diverse 
coloured sails, the gilded vanes, the many decorations of this gor- 
geous ship, had glittered in the sun and sunny water ; by night, a 
light had sparkled like a star at her mast-head. And now, en- 
camped near Hastings, with their leader lying in the old Roman 
castle of Pevensey, the English retiring in all directions, the land 
for miles around scorched and smoking, fired and pillaged, was the 
whole Norman power, hopeful and strong on English ground, 

Harold broke up the feast and hurried to London. Within a 
week, his army was ready. He sent out spies to ascertain the 
Norman strength. William took them, caused them to be led 
through his whole camp, and then dismissed. " The Normans," 
said these spies to Harold, "are not bearded on the upper lip as we 
English are, but are shorn. They are priests." "My men," re- 
plied Harold, with a laugh, "will find those priests good soldiers ! " 

" The Saxons," reported Duke William's outposts of Norman 
soldiers, who were instructed to retire as King Harold's army 
advanced, "rush on us through their pillaged country with the 
fury of madmen." 

" Let them come, and come soon ! " said Duke William. 

Some proposals for a reconciliation were made, but were soon 
abandoned. In the middle of the month of October, in the year 
one thousand and sixty-six, the Normans and the English came 
front to front. All night the armies lay encamped before each 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 363 

other, in a part of the country then called Senlac, now called (in 
remembrance of them) Battle. With the first dawn of day, they 
arose. There, in the faint light, were the English on a hill; a 
wood behind them ; in their midst, the Royal banner, representing 
a fighting warrior, woven in gold thread, adorned with precious 
stones ; beneath the banner, as it rustled in the wind, stood King 
Harold on foot, with two of his remaining brothers by his side ; 
around them, still and silent as the dead, clustered the whole Eng- 
lish army — every soldier covered by his shield, and bearing in his 
hand his dreaded English battle-axe. 

On an opposite hill, in three lines, archers, foot-soldiers, horse- 
men, was the Norman force. Of a sudden, a great battle-cry, " God 
help us ! " burst from the Norman lines. The English answered 
with their own battle-cry, " God's Rood ! Holy Rood ! " The 
Normans then came sweeping down the hill to attack the English. 

There was one tall Norman Knight who rode before the Norman 
army on a prancing horse, throwing up his heavy sword and catch- 
ing it, and singing of the bravery of his countrymen. An English 
Knight, who rode out from the English force to meet him, fell by 
this Knight's hand. Another English Knight rode out, and he fell 
too. But then a third rode out, and killed the Norman. This 
was in the first beginning of the fight. It soon raged everywhere. 

The English, keeping side by side in a great mass, cared no more 
for the showers of Norman arrows than if they had been showers 
of Norman rain. When the Norman horsemen rode against them, 
with their battle-axes they cut men and horses down. The Normans 
gave way. The English pressed forward. A cry went forth among 
the Norman troops that Duke William was killed. Duke William 
took off his helmet, in order that his face might be distinctly seen, and 
rode along the line before his men. This gave them courage. As they 
turned again to face the English, some of their Norman horse divided 
the pursuing body of the English from the rest, and thus all that fore- 
most portion of the English army fell, fighting bravely. The main 
body still remaining firm, heedless of the Norman arrows, and with 
their battle-axes cutting down the crowds of horseipen when they 
rode up, like forests of young trees, Duke William pretended to 
retreat. The eager English followed. The Norman army closed 
again, and fell upon them with great slaughter. 

" Still," said Duke William, " there are thousands of the English, 
firm as rocks around their King. Shoot upward, Norman archers, 
that your arrows may fall down upon their faces ! " 

The sun rose high, and sank, and the battle still raged. Through 
all the wild October day, the clash and din resounded in the air. 
In the red sunset, and in the white moonlight, heaps upon heaps 



364 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

of dead men lay strewn, a dreadful spectacle, all over the ground. 
King Harold, wounded with an arrow in the eye, was nearly blind. 
His brothers were already killed. Twenty Norman Knights, whose 
battered armour had flashed fiery and golden in the sunshine all day 
long, and now looked silvery in the moonlight, dashed forward to 
seize the Royal banner from the English Knights and soldiers, still 
faithfully collected round their blinded King. The King received 
a mortal wound, and dropped. The English broke and fled. The 
Normans rallied, and the day was lost. 

what a sight beneath the moon and stars, when lights were 
shining in the tent of the victorious Duke William, which was 
pitched near the spot where Harold fell — and he and his knights 
were carousing, within — and soldiers with torches, going slowly 
to and fro, without, sought for the corpse of Harold among piles 
of dead — and the Warrior, worked in golden thread and precious 
stones, lay low, all torn and soiled with blood — and the three 
Norman Lions kept watch over the field ! 



CHAPTER VIII. 

MNGLAND UNDER WILLIAM THE FIRST, THE NORMAN CONQUEROR. 

Upon the ground where the brave Harold fell, William the Nor- 
man afterwards founded an abbey, which, under the name of Battle 
Abbey, was a rich and splendid place through many a troubled 
year, though now it is a grey ruin overgrown with ivy. But the 
first work he had to do, was to conquer the English thoroughly ; 
and that, as you know by this time, was hard work for any man. 

He ravaged several counties ; he burned and plundered many 
towns ; he laid waste scores upon scores of miles of pleasant coun- 
try ; he destroyed innumerable lives. At length Stigand, Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, with other representatives of the clergy and 
the people, went to his camp, and submitted to him. Edgar, the 
insignificant son of Edmund Ironside, was proclaimed King by others, 
but nothing came of it. He fled to Scotland afterwards, where his 
sister, who was young and beautiful, married the Scottish King. 
Edgar himself was not important enough for anybody to care much 
about him. 

On Christmas Day, Wilham was crowned in Westminster Abbey, 
under the title of William the First ; but he is best known as 
William the Conqueror. It was a strange coronation. One of 
the bishops who performed the ceremony asked the Normans, in 
French, if they Avould have Duke William for their king 1 They 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 365 

answered Yes. Another of the bishops put the same question to 
the Saxons, in English. They too answered Yes, with a loud shout. 
The noise being heard by a guard of Norman horse-soldiers outside, 
was mistaken for resistance on the part of the English. The guard 
instantly set fire to the neighbouring houses, and a tumult ensued ; 
in the midst of which the King, being left alone in the Abbey, with 
a few priests (and they all being in a terrible fright together), was 
hurriedly crowned. When the crown was placed upon his head, 
he swore to govern the English as well as the best of their own 
monarchs. I dare say you think, as I do, that if we except the 
Great Alfred, he might pretty easily have done that. 

Numbers of the English nobles had been killed in the last disas- 
trous battle. Their estates, and the estates of all the nobles who 
had fought against him there. King William seized upon, and gave 
to his own Norman knights and nobles. Many great English fami- 
lies of the present time acquired their English lands in this way, 
and are very proud of it. 

But what is got by force must be maintained by force. These 
nobles were obliged to build castles all over England, to defend 
their new property ; and, do what he would, the King could neither 
soothe nor quell the nation as he wished. He gradually introduced 
the Norman language and the Norman customs ; yet, for a long 
time the great body of the English remained sullen and revengeful. 
On his going over to Normandy, to visit his subjects there, the op- 
pressions of his half-brother Odo, whom he left in charge of his 
English kingdom, drove the people mad. The men of Kent even 
invited over, to take possession of Dover, their old enemy Count 
Eustace of Boulogne, who had led the fray when the Dover man 
was slain at his own fireside. The men of Hereford, aided by the 
Welsh, and commanded by a chief named Edkic the Wild, drove 
the Normans out of their country. Some of those who had been 
dispossessed of their lands, banded together in the North of England ; 
some, in Scotland ; some, in the thick woods and marshes ; and 
whensoever they could fall upon the Normans, or upon the English 
who had submitted to the Normans, they fought, despoiled, and 
murdered, like the desperate outlaws that they were. Conspiracies 
were set on foot for a general massacre of the Normans, like the 
old massacre of the Danes. In short, the English were in a mur- 
derous mood all through the kingdom. 

King William, fearing he might lose his conquest, came back, 
and tried to pacify the London people by soft words. He then set 
forth to repress the country people by stern deeds. Among the 
towns which he besieged, and where he killed and maimed the in- 
habitants without any distinction, sparing none, young or old, 



366 A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 

armed or unarmed, were Oxford, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham, 
Derby, Lincoln, York. In all these places, and in many others, 
fire and sword worked their utmost horrors, and made the land 
dreadful to behold. The streams and rivers were discoloured with 
blood ; the sky was blackened with smoke ; the fields were wastes 
of ashes ; the waysides were heaped up with dead. Such are the 
fatal results of conquest and ambition ! Although William was a 
harsh and angry man, I do not suppose that he deliberately meant 
to work this shocking ruin, when he invaded England. But what 
he had got by the strong hand, he could only keep by the strong 
hand, and in so doing he made England a great grave. 

Two sons of Harold, by name Edmund and Godwin, came over 
from Ireland, with some ships, against the Normans, but were de- 
feated. This was scarcely done, when the outlaws in the woods so 
harassed York, that the Governor sent to the King for help. The 
King despatched a general and a large force to occupy the town of 
Durham. The Bishop of that place met the general outside the 
town, and warned him not to enter, as he would be in danger there. 
The general cared nothing for the warning, and went in with all his 
men. That night, on every hill within sight of Durham, signal 
fires were seen to blaze. When the morning dawned, the English, 
who had assembled in great strength, forced the gates, rushed into 
the town, and slew the Normans every one. The English afterwards 
besought the Danes to come and help them. The Danes came, 
with two hundred and forty ships. The outlawed nobles joined 
them ; they captured York, and drove the Normans out of that city. 
Then, William bribed the Danes to go away ; and took such ven- 
geance on the English, that all the former fire and sword, smoke 
and ashes, death and ruin, were nothing compared with it. In 
melancholy songs, and doleful stories, it was still sung and told by 
cottage fires on winter evenings, a hundred years afterwards, how, in 
those dreadful days of the Normans, there was not, from the River 
Humber to the River Tyne, one inhabited village left, nor one culti- 
vated field — how there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the 
human creatures and the beasts lay dead together. 

The outlaws had, at this time, what they called a Camp of Ref- 
uge, in the midst of the fens of Cambridgeshire. Protected by 
those marshy grounds which were difficult of approach, they lay 
among the reeds and rushes, and were hidden by the mists that 
rose up from the watery earth. Now, there also was, at that time, 
over the sea in Flanders, an Englishman named Herewaed, whose 
father had died in his absence, and whose property had been given 
to a Norman. When he heard of this wrong that had been done 
him (from such of the exiled English as chanced to wander into 



CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 367 

that country), he longed for revenge ; and joining the outlaws in 
their camp of refuge, became their commander. He was so good 
a soldier, that the Normans supposed him to be aided by enchant- 
ment. William, even after he had made a road three miles in 
length across the Cambridgeshire marshes, on purpose to attack 
this supposed enchanter, thought it necessary to engage an old 
lady, who pretended to be a sorceress, to come and do a little en- 
chantment in the royal cause. For this purpose she was pushed 
on before the troops in a wooden tower ; but Here ward very soon 
disposed of this unfortunate sorceress, by burning her, tower and 
all. The monks of the convent of Ely near at hand, however, who 
were fond of good living, and who found it very uncomfortable to 
have the country blockaded and their supplies of meat and drink 
cut off, showed the King a secret way of surprising the camp. So 
Hereward was soon defeated. Whether he afterwards died quietly, 
or whether he was killed after killing sixteen of the men who 
attacked him (as some old rhymes relate that he did), I cannot 
say. His defeat put an end to the Camp of Refuge ; and, very 
soon afterwards, the King, victorious both in Scotland and in Eng- 
land, quelled the last rebellious English noble. He then sur- 
rounded himself with Norman lords, enriched by the property of 
English nobles ; had a great survey made of all the land in Eng- 
land, which was entered as the property of its new owners, on a 
roll called Doomsday Book ; obliged the people to put out their 
fires and candles at a certain hour every night, on the ringing of a 
bell which was called The Curfew ; introduced the Norman dresses 
and manners ; made the Normans masters everywhere, and the Eng- 
lish, servants ; turned out the English bishops, and put Normans 
in their places ; and showed himself to be the Conqueror indeed. 

But, even with his own Normans, he had a restless life. They 
were always hungering and thirsting for the riches of the English ; 
and the more he gave, the more they wanted. His priests were as 
greedy as his soldiers. We know of only one Norman who plainly 
told his master, the King, that he had come with him to England 
to do his duty as a faithful servant, and that property taken by 
force from other men had no charms for him. His name was 
GuiLBERT. We should not forget his name, for it is good to 
remember and to honour honest men. 

Besides all these troubles, William the Conqueror was troubled 
by quarrels among his sons. He had three living. Robert, 
called CuRTHOSE, because of his short legs ; William, called Ru- 
Fus or the Red, from the colour of his hair ; and Henry, fond of 
learning, and called, in the Norman language, Beauclerc, or Fine- 
Scholar. When Robert grew up, he asked of his father the gov- 



368 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ernment of Normandy, which he had nominally possessed, as a 
child, under his mother, Matilda. The King refusing to grant 
it, Robert became jealous and discontented ; and happening one 
day, while in this temper, to be ridiculed by his brothers, who 
threw water on him from a balcony as he was walking before the 
door, he drew his sword, rushed up-stairs, and was only prevented 
by the King himself from putting them to death. That same 
night, he hotly departed with some followers from his father's 
court, and endeavoured to take the Castle of Rouen by surprise. 
Failing in this, he shut himself up in another Castle in Normandy, 
which the King besieged, and where Robert one day unhorsed and 
nearly killed him without knowing who he was. His submission 
when he discovered his father, and the intercession of the Queen 
and others, reconciled them; but not soundly; for Robert soon 
strayed abroad, and went from court to court with his complaints. 
He was a gay, careless, thoughtless fellow, spending all he got on 
musicians and dancers; but his mother loved him, and often, 
against the King's command, suppUed him with money through a 
messenger named Samson. At length the incensed King swore 
he would tear out Samson's eyes ; and Samson, thinking that his 
only hope of safety was in becoming a monk, became one, went on 
such errands no more, and kept his eyes in his head. 

AU this time, from the turbulent day of his strange coronation, 
the Conqueror had been struggling, you see, at any cost of cruelty 
and bloodshed, to maintain what he had seized. All his reign, he 
struggled still, with the same object ever before him. He was a 
stern bold man, and he succeeded in it. 

He loved money, and was particular in his eating, but he had 
only leisure to indulge one other passion, and that was his love of 
hunting. He carried it to such a height that he ordered whole 
villages and towns to be swept away to make forests for the deer. 
Not satisfied with sixty-eight Royal Forests, he laid waste an im- 
mense district, to form another in Hampshire, called the New For- 
est. The many thousands of miserable peasants who saw their 
little houses pulled down, and themselves and children turned into 
the open country without a shelter, detested him for his merciless 
addition to their many sufferings ; and when, in the twenty-first 
year of his reign (which proved to be the last), he went over to 
Rouen, England was as full of hatred against him, as if every 
leaf on every tree in all his Royal Forests had been a curse upon 
his head. In the New Forest, his son Richard (for he had four 
sons) had been gored to death by a Stag ; and the people said that 
this so cruelly-made Forest would yet be fatal to others of the 
Conqueror's race. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 369 

He was engaged in a dispute with the King of France about some 
territory. While he stayed at Kouen, negotiating with that King, 
he kept his bed and took medicines : being advised by his physicians to 
do so, on account of having grown to an unwieldy size. Word being 
brought to him that the King of France made light of this, and 
joked about it, he swore in a great rage that he should rue his jests. 
He assembled his army, marched into the disputed territory, burnt 

— his old way ! — the vines, the crops, and fruit, and set the town 
of Mantes on fire. But, in an evil hour ; for, as he rode over the 
hot ruins, his horse, setting his hoofs upon some burning embers, 
started, threw him forward against the pommel of the saddle, and 
gave him a mortal hurt. For six weeks he lay dying in a mon- 
astery near Rouen, and then made his wiU, giving England to Wil- 
liam, Normandy to Robert, and five thousand pounds to Henry. 
And now, his violent deeds lay heavy on his mind. He ordered 
money to be given to many English churches and monasteries, and 

— which was much better repentance — released his prisoners of 
state, some of whom had been confined in his dungeons twenty 



It was a September morning, and the sun was rising, when the 
King was awakened from slumber by the sound of a church beU. 
"What bell is that ? " he faintly asked. They told him it was the 
beU of the chapel of Saint Mary. " I commend my soul," said he, 
" to Mary ! " and died. 

Think of his name, The Conqueror, and then consider how he lay 
in death ! The moment he was dead, his physicians, priests, and 
nobles, not knowing what contest for the throne might now take 
place, or what might happen in it, hastened away, each man for him- 
self and his own property ; the mercenary servants of the court began 
to rob and plunder ; the body of the King, in the indecent strife, 
was rolled from the bed, and lay alone, for hours, upon the ground. 
Conqueror, of whom, so many great names are proud now, of whom 
so many great names thought nothing then, it were better to have 
conquered one true heart, than England ! 

By-and-bye, the priests came creeping in with prayers and candles; 
and a good knight, named Herluin, undertook (which no one else 
would do) to convey the body to Caen, in Normandy, in order that 
it might be buried in St. Stephen's church there, which the Con- 
queror had founded. But fire, of which he had made such bad use 
in his life, seemed to follow him of itself in death. A great conflagra- 
tion broke out in the town when the body was placed in the church ; 
and those present running out to extinguish the flames, it was once 
again left alone. 

It was not even buried in peace. It was about to be let down, 
2b 



370 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

in its Koyal robes, into a tomb near the high altar, in presence of a 
great concourse of people, when a loud voice in the crowd cried out, 
" This ground is mine ! Upon it, stood my father's house. This 
King despoiled me of both ground and house to build this church. 
In the great name of God, I here forbid his body to be covered with 
the earth that is my right ! " The priests and bishops present, 
knowing the speaker's right, and knowing that the King had often 
denied him justice, paid him down sixty shillings for the grave. 
Even then, the corpse w^as not at rest. The tomb was too small, 
and they tried to force it in. It broke, a dreadful smell arose, the 
people hurried out into the air, and, for the third time, it was left 
alone. 

Where were the Conqueror's three sons, that they were not at 
their father's burial ? Robert was lounging among minstrels, dancers, 
and gamesters, in France or Germany. Henry was carrying his five 
thousand pounds safely away in a convenient chest he had got made. 
William the Red was hurrying to England, to lay hands upon the 
Royal treasure and the crown. 



CHAPTER IX. 

ENGLAND UNDER WILLIAM THE SECOND, CALLED RUFUS. 

William the Red, in breathless haste, secured the three great 
forts of Dover, Pevensey, and Hastings, and made with hot speed 
for Winchester, where the Royal treasure was kept. The treasurer 
delivering him the keys, he found that it amounted to sixty thou- 
sand pounds in silver, besides gold and jewels. Possessed of this 
wealth, he soon persuaded the Archbishop of Canterbury to crown 
him, and became William the Second, King of England. 

Rufus was no sooner on the throne, than he ordered into prison 
again the unhappy state captives whom his father had set free, and 
directed a goldsmith to ornament his father's tomb profusely with 
gold and silver. It would have been more dutiful in him to have 
attended the sick Conqueror when he was dying; but England, 
itself, like this Red King, who once governed it, has sometimes 
made expensive tombs for dead men whom it treated shabbily when 
they were alive. 

The King's brother, Robert of Normandy, seeming quite content 
to be only Duke of that country ; and the King's other brother, 
Fine-Scholar, being quiet enough with his five thousand pounds in 
a chest ; the King flattered himself, we may suppose, with the 
hope of an easy reign. But easy reigns were difiicult to have in 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 371 

those days. The turbulent Bishop Odo (who had blessed the Nor- 
man army at the Battle of Hastings, and who, I dare say, took all 
the credit of the victory to himself) soon began, in concert with 
some powerful Norman nobles, to trouble the Red King. 

The truth seems to be that this bishop and his friends, who had 
lands in England and lands in Normandy, wished to hold both under 
one Sovereign; and greatly preferred a thoughtless good-natured 
person, such as Robert was, to Rufus ; who, though far from being 
an amiable man in any respect, was keen, and not to be imposed 
upon. They declared in Robert's favour, and retired to their 
castles (those castles were very troublesome to kings) in a sullen 
humour. The Red King, seeing the Normans thus falling from him, 
revenged himself upon them by appealing to the English ; to whom 
he made a variety of promises, which he never meant to perform — 
in particular, promises to soften the cruelty of the Forest Laws ; 
and who, in return, so aided him with their valour, that Odo was 
besieged in the Castle of Rochester, and forced to abandon it, and 
to depart from England for ever : whereupon the other rebellious 
Norman nobles were soon reduced and scattered. 

Then, the Red King went over to Normandy, where the people 
suffered greatly under the loose rule of Duke Robert. The King's 
object was to seize upon the Duke's dominions. This, the Duke, 
of course, prepared to resist ; and miserable war between the two 
brothers seemed inevitable, when the powerful nobles on both sides, 
who had seen so much of war, interfered to prevent it. A treaty 
was made. Each of the two brothers agreed to give up something 
of his claims, and that the longer-liver of the two should inherit all 
the dominions of the other. When they had come to this loving 
understanding, they embraced and joined their forces against Fine- 
Scholar ; who had bought some territory of Robert with a part of 
his five thousand pounds, and was considered a dangerous individual 
in consequence. 

St. Michael's Mount, in Normandy (there is another St. Michael's 
Mount, in Cornwall, wonderfully like it), was then, as it is now, a 
strong place perched upon the top of a high rock, around which, 
when the tide is in, the sea flows, leaving no road to the mainland. 
In this place, Fine-Scholar shut himself up with his soldiers, and 
here he was closely besieged by his two brothers. At one time, 
when he was reduced to great distress for want of water, the gen- 
erous Robert not only permitted his men to get water, but sent 
Fine-Scholar wine from his own table ; and, on being remonstrated 
with by the Red King, said, " What ! shall we let our own brother 
die of thirst? Where shall we get another, when he is gone?" 
At another time, the Red King riding alone on the shore of the bay, 



372 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

looking up at the Castle, was taken by two of Fine-Scholar's men, 
one of whom was about to kill him, when he cried out, " Hold, 
knave ! I am the King of England ! " The story says that the 
soldier raised him from the ground respectfully and humbly, and 
that the King took him into his service. The story may or may 
not be true ; but at any rate it is true that Fine-Scholar could not 
hold out against his united brothers, and that he abandoned Mount 
St. Michael, and wandered about — as poor and forlorn as other 
scholars have been sometimes known to be. 

The Scotch became unquiet in the Red King's time, and were 
twice defeated — the second time, with the loss of their King, 
Malcolm, and his son. The Welsh became unquiet too. Against 
them, Rufus was less successful ; for they fought among their 
native mountains, and did great execution on the King's troops. 
Robert of Normandy became unquiet too ; and, complaining that 
his brother the King did not faithfully perform his part of their 
agreement, took up arms, and obtained assistance from the King of 
France, whom Rufus, in the end, bought off with vast sums of 
money. England became unquiet too. Lord Mowbray, the power- 
ful Earl of Northumberland, headed a great conspiracy to depose 
the King, and to place upon the throne, Stephen, the Conqueror's 
near relative. The plot was discovered ; all the chief conspirators 
were seized; some were fined, some were put in prison, some were 
put to death. The Earl of Northumberland himself was shut up in a 
dungeon beneath Windsor Castle, where he died, an old man, thirty 
long years afterwards. The Priests in England were more unquiet 
than any other class or power ; for the Red King treated them with 
such small ceremony that he refused to appoint new bishops or arch- 
bishops when the old ones died, but kept all the wealth belonging to 
those officers in his own hands. In return for this, the Priests wrote 
his life when he was dead, and abused him well. I am inclined to 
think, myself, that there was little to choose between the Priests 
and the Red King; that both sides were greedy and designing ; and 
that they were fairly matched. 

The Red King was false of heart, selfish, covetous, and mean. 
He had a worthy minister in his favourite, Ralph, nicknamed — 
for almost every famous person had a nickname in those rough days 
— Flambard, or the Firebrand. Once, the King being ill, became 
penitent, and made Anselm, a foreign priest and a good man. 
Archbishop of Canterbury. But he no sooner got well again than 
he repented of his repentance, and persisted in wrongfully keeping 
to himself some of the wealth belonging to the archbishopric. This 
led to violent disputes, which were aggravated by there being in 
Rome at that time two rival Popes ; each of whom declared he was 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 373 

the only real original infallible Pope, who couldn't make a mistake. 
At last, Anselm, knowing the Red King's character, and not feel- 
ing himself safe in England, asked leave to return abroad. The 
Red King gladly gave it ; for he knew that as soon as Anselm was 
gone, he could begin to store up all the Canterbury money again, 
for his own use. 

By such means, and by taxing and oppressing the English people 
in every possible way, the Red King became very rich. When he 
wanted money for any purpose, he raised it by some means or 
other, and cared nothing for the injustice he did, or the misery he 
caused. Having the opportunity of buying from Robert the whole 
duchy of Normandy for five years, he taxed the English people 
more than ever, and made the very convents sell their plate and 
valuables to supply him with the means to make the purchase. 
But he was as quick and eager in putting down revolt as he was 
in raising money ; for, a part of the Norman people objecting — 
very naturally, I think — to being sold in this way, he headed an 
army against them with all the speed and energy of his father. 
He was so impatient, that he embarked for Normandy in a great gale 
of wind. And when the sailors told him it was dangerous to go to 
sea in such angry weather, he replied, " Hoist sail and away ! 
Did you ever hear of a king who was drowned ? " 

You will wonder how it was that even the careless Robert came 
to sell his dominions. It happened thus. It had long been the 
custom for many English people to make journeys to Jerusalem, 
which were called pilgrimages, in order that they might pray be- 
side the tomb of Our Saviour there. Jerusalem belonging to the 
Turks, and the Turks hating Christianity, these Christian travellers 
were often insulted and ill used. The Pilgrims bore it patiently 
for some time, but at length a remarkable man, of great earnest- 
ness and eloquence, called Peter the Hermit, began to preach 
in various places against the Turks, and to declare that it was the 
duty of good Christians to drive away those unbelievers from the 
tomb of Our Saviour, and to take possession of it, and protect it. 
An excitement such as the world had never known before was 
created. Thousands and thousands of men of all ranks and con- 
ditions departed for Jerusalem to make war against the Turks. 
The war is called in history the first Crusade ; and every Crusader 
wore a cross marked on his right shoulder. 

All the Crusaders were not zealous Christians. Among them 
were vast numbers of the restless, idle, profligate, and adventurous 
spirits of the time. Some became Crusaders for the love of change ; 
some, in the hope of plunder ; some, because they had nothing to 
do at home ; some, because they did what the priests told them ; 



374 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

some, because they liked to see foreign countries; some, because 
they were fond of knocking men about, and would as soon knock a 
Turk about as a Christian. Robert of Normandy may have been 
influenced by all these motives ; and by a kind desire, besides, to 
save the Christian Pilgrims from bad treatment in future. He 
wanted to raise a number of armed men, and to go to the Crusade. 
He could not do so without money. He had no money ; and he 
sold his dominions to his brother, the Red King, for five years. 
With the large sum he thus obtained, he fitted out his Crusaders 
gallantly, and went away to Jerusalem in martial state. The Red 
King, who made money out of everything, stayed at home, busily 
squeezing more money out of Normans and English. 

After three years of great hardship and suftering — from ship- 
wreck at sea ; from travel in strange lands ; from hunger, thirst, 
and fever, upon the burning sands of the desert; and from the 
fury of the Turks — the valiant Crusaders got possession of Our 
Saviour's tomb. The Turks were still resisting and fighting bravely, 
but this success increased the general desire in Europe to join the 
Crusade, Another great French Duke was proposing to sell his 
dominions for a term to the rich Red King, when the Red King's 
reign came to a sudden and violent end. 

You have not forgotten the New Forest which the Conqueror 
made, and which the miserable people whose homes he had laid 
waste, so hated. The cruelty of the Forest Laws, and the torture 
and death they brought upon the peasantry, increased this hatred. 
The poor persecuted country people believed that the New Forest 
was enchanted. They said that in thunder-storms, and on dark 
nights, demons appeared, moving beneath the branches of the 
gloomy trees. They said that a terrible spectre had foretold to 
Norman hunters that the Red King should be punished there. 
And now, in the pleasant season of May, when the Red King had 
reigned almost thirteen years; and a second Prince of the Con- 
queror's blood — another Richard, the son of Duke Robert — was 
killed by an arrow in this dreaded Forest ; the people said that 
the second time was not the last, and that there was another death 
to come. 

It was a lonely forest, accursed in the people's hearts for the 
wicked deeds that had been done to make it ; and no man save 
the King and his Courtiers and Huntsmen, liked to stray there. 
But, in reality, it was like any other forest. In the spring, the 
green leaves broke out of the buds ; in the summer, flourished 
heartily, and made deep shades; in the winter, shrivelled and 
blew down, and lay in brown heaps on the moss. Some trees were 
stately, and grew high and strong ; some had fallen of themselves ; 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 375 

some were felled by the forester's axe ; some were hollow, and the 
rabbits burrowed at their roots ; some few were struck by lightning, 
and stood white and bare. There were hill-sides covered with rich 
fern, on which the morning dew so beautifully sparkled; there 
were brooks, where the deer went down to drink, or over which 
the whole herd bounded, flying from the arrows of the huntsmen ; 
there were sunny glades, and solemn places where but little light 
came through the rustling leaves. The songs of the birds in the 
New Forest were pleasanter to hear than the shouts of fighting 
men outside ; and even when the Red King and his Court came 
hunting through its solitudes, cursing loud and riding hard, with 
a jingling of stirrups and bridles and knives and daggers, they did 
much less harm there than among the English or Normans, and the 
stags died (as they lived) far easier than the people. 

Upon a day in August, the Red King, now reconciled to his 
brother, Fine-Scholar, came with a great train to hunt in the New 
Forest. Fine-Scholar was of the party. They were a merry party, 
and had lain all night at Malwood-Keep, a hunting-lodge in the 
forest, where they had made good cheer, both at supper and break- 
fast, and had drunk a deal of wine. The party dispersed in vari- 
ous directions, as the custom of hunters then was. The King took 
with him only Sir Walter Tyrrel, who was a famous sportsman, 
and to whom he had given, before they mounted horse that morn- 
ing, two fine arrows. 

The last time the King was ever seen alive, he was riding with 
Sir Walter Tyrrel, and their dogs were hunting together. 

It was almost night, when a poor charcoal-burner, passing through 
the forest with his cart, came upon the solitary body of a dead man, 
shot with an arrow in the breast, and still bleeding. He got it 
into his cart. It was the body of the King. Shaken and tum- 
bled, with its red beard all whitened with lime and clotted with 
blood, it was driven in the cart by the charcoal-burner next day to 
Winchester Cathedral, where it was received and buried. 

Sir Walter Tyrrel, who escaped to Normandy, and claimed the 
protection of the King of France, swore in France that the Red 
King was suddenly shot dead by an arrow from an unseen hand, 
while they were hunting together; that he was fearful of being 
suspected as the King's murderer ; and that he instantly set spurs 
to his horse, and fled to the sea-shore. Others declared that the 
King and Sir Walter Tyrrel were hunting in company, a little 
before sunset, standing in bushes opposite one another, when a 
stag came between them. That the King drew his bow and took 
aim, but the string broke. That the King then cried, "Shoot, 
Walter, in the Devil's name ! " That Sir Walter shot. That the 




THE FINDING OF THE BODY OF KUFUS. 



A CHILD'S HISTOliY OE ENGLAND. 377 

arrow glanced against a tree, was turned aside from the stag, and 
struck the King from his horse, dead. 

By whose hand the Red King really fell, and whether that hand 
despatched the arrow to his breast by accident or by design, is only 
known to God. Some think his brother may have caused him to 
be killed ; but the Red King had made so many enemies, both 
among priests and people, that suspicion may reasonably rest upon 
a less unnatural murderer. Men know no more than that he was 
found dead in the New Forest, which the suffering people had 
regarded as a doomed ground for his race. 



CHAPTER X. 

ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE FIRST, CALLED FINE-SCHOLAR. 

Fine-Scholar, on hearing of the Red King's death, hurried to 
Winchester with as much speed as Rufus himself had made, to 
seize the Royal treasure. But the keeper of the treasure, who 
had been one of the hunting-party in the Forest, made haste to 
Winchester too, and, arriving there at about the same time, refused 
to yield it up. Upon this, Fine-Scholar drew his sword, and threat- 
ened to kill the treasurer ; who might have paid for his fidelity with 
his life, but that he knew longer resistance to be useless when he 
found the Prince supported by a company of powerful barons, 
who declared they were determined to make him King. The 
treasurer, therefore, gave up the money and jewels of the Crown : 
and on the third day after the death of the Red King, being a 
Sunday, Fine-Scholar stood before the high altar in Westminster 
Abbey, and made a solemn declaration that he would . resign the 
Church property which his brother had seized ; that he would do 
no wrong to the nobles ; and that he would restore to the people 
the laws of Edward the Confessor, with aU the improvements of 
William the Conqueror. So began the reign of King Henry the 
First. 

The people were attached to their new King, both because he 
had known distresses, and because he was an Englishman by birth 
and not a Norman. To strengthen this last hold upon them, the 
King wished to marry an English lady ; and could think of no 
other wife than Maud the Good, the daughter of the King of 
Scotland. Although this good Princess did not love the King, she 
was so affected by the representations the nobles made to her of 
the great charity it would be in her to unite the Norman and Saxon 
races, and prevent hatred and bloodshed between them for the future, 



378 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

that she consented to become his wife. After some disputing among 
the priests, who said that as she had been in a convent in her youth, 
and had worn the veil of a nun, she could not lawfidly be married 
— against which the Princess stated that her aunt, with whom she 
had lived in her youth, had indeed sometimes thrown a piece of 
black stuff over her, but for no other reason than because the nun's 
veil was the only dress the conquering Normans respected in girl 
or woman, and not because she had taken the vows of a nun, which 
she never had — she was declared free to marry, and was made 
King Henry's Queen. A good Queen she was ; beautiful, kind- 
hearted, and worthy of a better husband than the King. 

For he was a cunning and unscrupulous man, though firm and 
clever. He cared very little for his word, and took any means to 
gain his ends. All this is shown in his treatment of his brother 
Robert — Robert, who had suffered him to be refreshed with water, 
and who had sent him the wine from his own table, when he was 
shut up, with the crows flying below him, parched with thirst, in 
the castle on the top of St. Michael's Mount, where his Red brother 
would have let him die. 

Before the King began to deal with Robert, he removed and dis- 
graced all the favourites of the late King; who were for the most 
part base characters, much detested by the people. Flambard, or 
Firebrand, whom the late King had made Bishop of Durham, of all 
things in the world, Henry imprisoned in the Tower; but Firebrand 
was a great joker and a jolly companion, and made himself so popu- 
lar with his guards that they pretended to know nothing about a 
long rope that was sent into his prison at the bottom of a deep 
flagon of wine. The guards took the wine, and Firebrand took the 
rope; with which, when they were fast asleep, he let himself down 
from a winjdow in the night, and so got cleverly aboard ship and 
away to Normandy. 

Now Robert, when his brother Fine-Scholar came to the throne, 
was still absent in the Holy Land, Henry pretended that Robert 
had been made Sovereign of that country ; and he had been away 
so long, that the ignorant people believed it. But, behold, when 
Henry had been some time King of England, Robert came home to 
Normandy ; having leisurely returned from Jerusalem through Italy, 
in which beautiful country he had enjoyed himself very much, and 
had married a lady as beautiful as itself ! In Normandy, he found 
Firebrand waiting to urge him to assert his claim to the English 
crown, and declare war against King Henry. This, after great loss 
of time in feasting and dancing with his beautiful Italian wife 
among his Norman friends, he at last did. 

The English in general were on King Henry's side, though many 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 379 

of the Normans were on Robert's. But the English sailors deserted 
the King, and took a great part of the English fleet over to Nor- 
mandy ; so that Robert came to invade this country in no foreign 
vessels, but in English ships. The virtuous Anselm, however, 
whom Henry had invited back from abroad, and made Archbishop 
of Canterbury, was steadfast in the King's cause ; and it was so 
well supported that the two armies, instead of fighting, made a 
peace. Poor Robert, who trusted anybody and everybody, readily 
trusted his brother, the King; and agreed to go home and receive 
a pension from England, on condition that all his followers were 
fully pardoned. This the King very faithfully promised, but Robert 
was no sooner gone than he began to punish them. 

Among them was the Earl of Shrewsbury, who, on being sum- 
moned by the King to answer to five-and-forty accusations, rode 
away to one of his strong castles, shut himself up therein, called 
around him his tenants and vassals, and fought for his liberty, but 
was defeated and banished. Robert, with all his faults, was so true 
to his word, that when he first heard of this nobleman having risen 
against his brother, he laid waste the Earl of Shrewsbury's estates 
in Normandy, to show the King that he would favour no breach of 
their treaty. Finding, on better information, afterwards, that the 
Earl's only crime was having been his friend, he came over to Eng- 
land, in his old thoughtless warm-hearted way, to intercede with 
the King, and remind him of the solemn promise to pardon all his 
followers. 

This confidence might have put the false King to the blush, but 
it did not. Pretending to be very friendly, he so surrounded his 
brother with spies and traps, that Robert, who was quite in his 
power, had nothing for it but to renounce his pension and escape 
while he could. Getting home to Normandy, and understanding 
the King better now, he naturally allied himself with his old friend 
the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had still thirty castles in that country. 
This was exactly what Henry wanted. He immediately declared 
that Robert had broken the treaty, and next year invaded Nor- 
mandy. 

He pretended that he came to deliver the Normans, at their own 
request, from his brother's misrule. There is reason to fear that 
his misrule was bad enough ; for his beautiful wife had died, leav- 
ing him with an infant son, and his court was again so careless, 
dissipated, and ill-regulated, that it was said he sometimes lay in 
bed of a day for want of clothes to put on — his attendants having 
stolen all his dresses. But he headed his army like a brave prince 
and a gallant soldier, though he had the misfortune to be taken 
prisoner by King Henry, with four hundred of his Knights. Among 



380 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

them was poor harmless Edgar Atheling, who loved Robert well. 
Edgar was not important enough to be severe with. The King 
afterwards gave him a small pension, which he lived upon and died 
upon, in peace, among the quiet woods and fields of England. 

And Robert — poor, kind, generous, wasteful, heedless Robert, 
with so many faults, and yet with virtues that might have made a 
better and a happier man — what was the end of him ? If the 
King had had the magnanimity to say with a kind air, " Brother, 
tell me, before these noblemen, that from this time you will be my 
faithful follower and friend, and never raise your hand against me 
or my forces more ! " he might have trusted Robert to the death. But 
the King was not a magnanimous man. He sentenced his brother 
to be confined for life in one of the Royal Castles. In the beginning 
of his imprisonment, he was allowed to ride out, guarded ; but he 
one day broke away from his guard and galloped off. He had the 
evil fortune to ride into a swamp, where his horse stuck fast and 
he was taken. When the King heard of it he ordered him to 
be blinded, which was done by putting a red-hot metal basin on 
his eyes. 

And so, in darkness and in prison, many years, he thought of aU 
his past life, of the time he had wasted, of the treasure he had 
squandered, of the opportunities he had lost, of the youth he had 
thrown away, of the talents he had neglected. Sometimes, on fine 
autumn mornings, he would sit and think of the old hunting parties 
in the free Forest, where he had been the foremost and the gayest. 
Sometimes, in the still nights, he would wake, and mourn for the 
many nights that had stolen past him at the gaming-table ; some- 
times, would seem to hear, upon the melancholy wind, the old songs 
of the minstrels ; sometimes, would dream, in his blindness, of the 
light and glitter of the Norman Court. Many and many a time, 
he groped back, in his fancy, to Jerusalem, where he had fought so 
well ; or, at the head of his brave companions, bowed his feathered 
helmet to the shouts of welcome greeting him in Italy, and seemed 
again to walk among the sunny vineyards, or on the shore of the blue 
sea, with his lovely wife. And then, thinking of her grave, and of 
his fatherless boy, he would stretch out his solitary arms and weep. 

At length, one day, there lay in prison, dead, with cruel and 
disfiguring scars upon his eyelids, bandaged from his jailer's sight, 
but on which the eternal Heavens looked down, a worn old man of 
eighty. He had once been Robert of Normandy. Pity him ! 

At the time when Robert of Normandy was taken prisoner by 
his brother, Robert's little son was only five years old. This child 
was taken, too, and carried before the King, sobbing and crying ; 
for, young as he was, he knew he had good reason to be afraid of 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 381 

his Royal uncle. The King was not much accustomed to pity 
those who were in his power, but his cold heart seemed for the 
moment to soften towards the boy. He was observed to make a 
great effort, as if to prevent himself from being cruel, and ordered 
the child to be taken away ; whereupon a certain Baron, who had 
married a daughter of Duke Robert's (by name, Helie of Saint 
Saen), took charge of him, tenderly. The King's gentleness did 
not last long. Before two years were over, he sent messengers to 
this lord's Castle to seize the child and bring him away. The 
Baron was not there at the time, but his servants were faithful, 
and carried the boy off in his sleep and hid him. When the Baron 
came home, and was told what the King had done, he took the 
child abroad, and, leading him by the hand, went from King to 
King and from Court to Court, relating how the child had a claim 
to the throne of England, and how his uncle the King, knowing 
that he had that claim, would have murdered him, perhaps, but 
for his escape. 

The youth and innocence of the pretty little William Fitz- 
RoBERT (for that was his name) made him many friends at that 
time. When he became a young man, the King of France, uniting 
with the French Counts of Anjou and Flanders, supported his 
cause against the King of England, and took many of the King's 
towns and castles in Normandy. But, King Henry, artful and 
cunning always, bribed some of William's friends with money, some 
with promises, some with power. He bought off the Count of 
Anjou, by promising to marry his eldest son, also named William, 
to the Count's daughter ; and indeed the whole trust of this King's 
life was in such bargains, and he believed (as many another King 
has done since, and as one King did in France a very little time 
ago) that every man's truth and honour can be bought at some 
price. For all this, he was so afraid of William Fitz-Robert and 
his friends, that, for a long time, he believed his life to be in danger ; 
and never lay down to sleep, even in his palace surrounded by his 
guards, without having a sword and buckler at his bedside. 

To strengthen his power, the King with great ceremony betrothed 
his eldest daughter Matilda, then a child only eight years old, to 
be the wife of Henry the Fifth, the Emperor of Germany. To 
raise her marriage-portion, he taxed the English people in a most 
oppressive manner; then treated them to a great procession, to 
restore their good humour ; and sent Matilda away, in fine state, 
with the German ambassadors, to be educated in the country of 
her future husband. 

And now his Queen, Maud the Good, unhappily died. It was 
a sad thought for that gentle lady, that the only hope with which 



382 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

she had married a man whom she had never loved — the hope of 
reconcihng the Norman and Enghsh races — had failed. At the 
very time of her death, Normandy and all France was in arms 
against England ; for, so soon as his last danger was over. King 
Henry had been false to all the French powers he had promised, 
bribed, and bought, and they had naturally united against him. 
After some fighting, however, in w^hich few suffered but the un- 
happy common people (who always sufi'ered, whatsoever was the 
matter), he began to promise, bribe, and buy again ; and by those 
means, and by the help of the Pope, who exerted himself to save 
more bloodshed, and by solemnly declaring, over and over again, 
that he really was in earnest this time, and would keep his word, 
the King made peace. 

One of the first consequences of this peace was, that the King 
went over to Normandy with his son Prince William and a great 
retinue, to have the Prince acknowledged as his successor by the 
Norman Nobles, and to contract the promised marriage (this was 
one of the many promises the King had broken) between him and 
the daughter of the Count of Anjou. Both these things were 
triumphantly done, with great show and rejoicing; and on the 
twenty-fifth of November, in the year one thousand one hundred 
and twenty, the whole retinue prepared to embark at the Port of 
Barfleur, for the voyage home. 

On that day, and at that place, there came to the King, Fitz- 
Stephen, a sea-captain, and said : 

"My liege, my father served your father all his life, upon the 
sea. He steered the ship with the golden boy upon the prow, in 
which your father sailed to conquer England. I beseech you to 
grant me the same ofiice. I have a fair vessel in the harbour here, 
called The White Ship, manned by fifty sailors of renown. I pray 
you. Sire, to let your servant have the honour of steering you in 
The White Ship to England ! " 

"I am sorry, friend," replied the King, "that my vessel is 
already chosen, and that I cannot (therefore) sail with the son of 
the man who served my father. But the Prince and all his com- 
pany shall go along with you, in the fair White Ship, manned by 
the fifty sailors of renown." 

An hour or two afterwards, the King set sail in the vessel he 
had chosen, accompanied by other vessels, and, sailing all night 
with a fair and gentle wind, arrived upon the coast of England in 
the morning. While it was yet night, the people in some of those 
ships heard a faint wild cry come over the sea, and wondered what 
it was. 

Now, the Prince was a dissolute, debauched young man of eigh- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 383 

teen, who bore no love to the English, and had declared that when 
he came to the throne he would yoke them to the plough like oxen. 
He went aboard The White Ship, with one hundred and forty 
youthful Nobles like himself, among whom were eighteen noble 
ladies of the highest rank. All this gay company, with their 
servants and the fifty sailors, made three hundred souls aboard the 
fair White Ship. 

"Give three casks of wine, Fitz-Stephen," said the Prince, "to 
the fifty sailors of renown ! My father the King has sailed out of 
the harbour. What time is there to make merry here, and yet 
reach England with the rest 1 " 

" Prince," said Fitz-Stephen, " before morning, my fifty and The 
White Ship shall overtake the swiftest vessel in attendance on your 
father the King, if we sail at midnight ! " 

Then, the Prince commanded to make merry ; and the sailors 
drank out the three casks of wine ; and the Prince and all the noble 
company danced in the moonlight on the deck of The White Ship. 

When, at last, she shot out of the harbour of Barfleur, there was 
not a sober seaman on board. But the sails were all set, and the 
oars all going merrily. Fitz-Stephen had the helm. The gay young 
Nobles and the beautiful ladies, wrapped in mantles of various 
bright colours to protect them from the cold, talked, laughed, and 
sang. The Prince encouraged the fifty sailors to row harder yet, 
for the honour of The White Ship. 

Crash ! A terrific cry broke from three hundred hearts. It was 
the cry the people in the distant vessels of the King heard faintly 
on the water. The White Ship had struck upon a rock — was 
filling — going down ! 

Fitz-Stephen hurried the Prince into a boat, with some few 
Nobles. " Push off"," he whispered ; " and row to the land. It is 
not far, and the sea is smooth. The rest of us must die." 

But, as they rowed away, fast, from the sinking ship, the Prince 
heard the voice of his sister Marie, the Countess of Perche, calling 
for help. He never in his life had been so good as he was then. 
He cried in an agony, " Row back at any risk ! I cannot bear to 
leave her ! " 

They rowed back. As the Prince held out his arms to catch 
his sister, such numbers leaped in, that the boat was overset. And 
in the same instant The White Ship went down. 

Only two men floated. They both clung to the main yard of 
the ship, which had broken from the mast, and now supported 
them. One asked the other who he was? He said, "I am a 
nobleman, Godfrey by name, the son of Gilbert de l'Aigle. 
And you ?" said he. "I am Berold, a poor butcher of Rouen," 



384 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

was the answer. Then, they said together, " Lord be merciful to 
us both ! " and tried to encourage one another, as they drifted in 
the cold benumbing sea on that unfortunate November night. 

By-and-bye, another man came swimming towards them, whom 
they knew, when he pushed aside his long wet hair, to be Fitz- 
Stephen. "Where is the Prince?" said he. "Gone! Gone!" 
the two cried together. "Neither he, nor his brother, nor his 
sister, nor the King's niece, nor her brother, nor any one of all the 
brave three hundred, noble or commoner, except we three, has 
risen above the water ! " Fitz-Stephen, with a ghastly face, cried, 
" Woe ! woe, to me ! " and sunk to the bottom. 

The other two clung to the yard for some hours. At length 
the young noble said faintly, " I am exhausted, and chilled with 
the cold, and can hold no longer. Farewell, good friend ! God 
preserve you ! " So, he dropped and sunk ; and of all the brilliant 
crowd, the poor Butcher of Rouen alone was saved. In the morn- 
ing, some fishermen saw him floating in his sheep-skin coat, and 
got him into their boat — the sole relater of the dismal tale. 

For three days, no one dared to carry the intelligence to the 
King. At length, they sent into his presence a little boy, who, 
weeping bitterly, and kneeling at his feet, told him that The White 
Ship was lost with all on board. The King fell to the ground like 
a dead man, and never, never afterwards, was seen to smile. 

But he plotted again, and promised again, and bribed and bought 
again, in his old deceitful way. Having no son to succeed him, 
after all his pains ("The Prince will never yoke us to the plough, 
now ! " said the English people), he took a second wife — Adelais 
or Alice, a duke's daughter, and the Pope's niece. Having no 
more children, however, he proposed to the Barons to swear that 
they would recognise as his successor, his daughter Matilda, whom, 
as she was now a widow, he married to the eldest son of the Count 
of Anjou, Geoffrey, surnamed Plantagenet, from a custom he 
had of wearing a sprig of flowering broom (called Genet in French) 
in his cap for a feather. As one false man usually makes many, 
and as a false King, in particular, is pretty certain to make a false 
Court, the Barons took the oath about the succession of Matilda 
(and her children after her), twice over, without in the least in- 
tending to keep it. The King was now relieved from any remain- 
ing fears of William Fitz-Robert, by his death in the Monastery of 
St. Omer, in France, at twenty-six years old, of a pike-wound in 
the hand. And as Matilda gave birth to three sons, he thought 
the succession to the throne secure. 

He spent most of the latter part of his life, which was troubled 
by family quarrels, in Normandy, to be near Matilda. When he 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 385 

had reigned upwards of thirty-five years, and was sixty-seven years 
old, he died of an indigestion and fever, brought on by eating, when 
he was far from well, of a fish called Lamprey, against which he 
had often been cautioned by his physicians. His remains were 
brought over to Eeading Abbey to be buried. 

You may perhaps hear the cunning and promise-breaking of 
King Henry the First called "policy" by some people, and 
" diplomacy " by others. Neither of these fine words will in the 
least mean that it was true ; and nothing that is not true can pos- 
sibly be good. 

His greatest merit, that I know of, was his love of learning. I 
should have given him greater credit even for that, if it had been 
strong enough to induce him to spare the eyes of a certain poet he 
once took prisoner, who was a knight besides. But he ordered the 
poet's eyes to be torn from his head, because he had laughed at 
him in his verses ; and the poet, in the pain of that torture, dashed 
out his own brains against his prison wall. King Henry the First 
was avaricious, revengeful, and so false, that I suppose a man never 
lived whose word was less to be relied upon. 



CHAPTER XL 

ENGLAND UNDER MATILDA AND STEPHEN. 

The King was no sooner dead than all the plans and schemes he 
had laboured at so long, and lied so much for, crumbled away like 
a hollow heap of sand. Stephen, whom he had never mistrusted 
or suspected, started up to claim the throne. 

Stephen was the son of Adela, the Conqueror's daughter, mar- 
ried to the Count of Blois. To Stephen, and to his brother Henry, 
the late King had been liberal ; making Henry Bishop of Winches- 
ter, and finding a good marriage for Stephen, and much enriching 
him. This did not prevent Stephen from hastily producing a false 
witness, a servant of the late King, to swear that the King had 
named him for his heir upon his death-bed. On this evidence the 
Archbishop of Canterbury crowned him. The new King, so sud- 
denly made, lost not a moment in seizing the Royal treasure, and 
hiring foreign soldiers with some of it to protect his throne. 

If the dead King had even done as the false witness said, he would 
have had small right to will away the English people, like so many 
sheep or oxen, without their consent. But he had, in fact, bequeathed 
all his territory to Matilda ; who, supported by Robert, Earl of 
Gloucester, soon began to dispute the crown. Some of the power- 
2c 



386 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ful barons and priests took her side ; some took Stephen's ; all forti- 
fied their castles ; and again the miserable English people were 
involved in war, from which they could never derive advantage 
whosoever was victorious, and in which all parties plundered, tort- 
ured, starved, and ruined them. 

Five years had passed since the death of Henry the First — and 
during those five years there had been two terrible invasions by the 
people of Scotland under their King, David, who was at last defeated 
with all his army — when Matilda, attended by her brother Kobert 
and a large force, appeared in England to maintain her claim. A 
battle was fought between her troops and King Stephen's at Lin- 
coln ; in which the King himself was taken prisoner, after bravely 
fighting until his battle-axe and sword were broken, and was carried 
into strict confinement at Gloucester. Matilda then submitted her- 
self to the Priests, and the Priests crowned her Queen of England. 

She did not long enjoy this dignity. The people of London had 
a great aff'ection for Stephen ; many of the Barons considered it de- 
grading to be ruled by a woman ; and the Queen's temper was so 
haughty that she made innumerable enemies. The people of Lon- 
don revolted ; and, in alliance with the troops of Stephen, besieged 
her at Winchester, where they took her brother Robert prisoner, 
whom, as her best soldier and chief general, she was glad to exchange 
for Stephen himself, who thus regained his liberty. Then, the long 
war went on afresh. Once, she was pressed so hard in the Castle 
of Oxford, in the winter weather when the snow lay thick upon the 
ground, that her only chance of escape was to dress herself all in 
white, and, accompanied by no more than three faithful Knights, 
dressed in like manner that their figures might not be seen from 
Stephen's camp as they passed over the snow, to steal away on 
foot, cross the frozen Thames, walk a long distance, and at last 
gallop away on horseback. All this she did, but to no great pur- 
pose then ; for her brother dying while the struggle was yet going 
on, she at last withdrew to Normandy. 

In two or three years after her withdrawal her cause appeared in 
England, afresh, in the person of her son Henry, young Plantage- 
net, who, at only eighteen years of age, was very powerful : not 
only on account of his mother having resigned all Normandy to 
him, but also from his having married Eleanor, the divorced wife 
of the French King, a bad woman, who had great possessions in 
France. Louis, the French King, not relishing this arrangement, 
helped Eustace, King Stephen's son, to invade Normandy : but 
Henry drove their united forces out of that country, and then re- 
turned here, to assist his partisans, whom the King was then besieg- 
ing at Wallingford upon the Thames. Here, for two days, divided 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 387 

only by the river, the two armies lay encamped opposite to one 
another — on the eve, as it seemed to all men, of another desperate 
fight, when the Earl of Arundel took heart and said " that it 
was not reasonable to prolong the unspeakable miseries of two king- 
doms to minister to the ambition of two princes." 

Many other noblemen repeating and supporting this when it 
was once uttered, Stephen and young Plantagenet went down, each 
to his own bank of the river, and held a conversation across it, in 
which they arranged a truce; very much to the dissatisfaction of 
Eustace, who swaggered away with some followers, and laid violent 
hands on the Abbey of Saint Edmund's-Bury, where he presently died 
mad. The truce led to a solemn council at Winchester, in which it 
was agreed that Stephen should retain the crown, on condition of 
his declaring Henry his successor ; that William, another son 
of the King's, should inherit his father's rightful possessions ; and 
that all the Crown lands which Stephen had given away should be 
recalled, and all the Castles he had permitted to be built demolished. 
Thus terminated the bitter war, which had now lasted fifteen years, 
and had again laid England waste. In the next year Stephen 
died, after a troubled reign of nineteen years. 

Although King Stephen was, for the time in which he lived, a 
humane and moderate man, with many excellent qualities ; and al- 
though nothing worse is known of him than his usurpation of the 
Crown, which heprobably excused to himself by the consideration that 
King Henry the First was an usurper too — which was no excuse 
at all ; the people of England suffered more in these dread nineteen 
years, than at any former period even of their suffering history. In 
the division of the nobility between the two rival claimants of the 
Crown, and in the growth of what is called the Feudal System 
(which made the peasants the born vassals and mere slaves of the 
Barons), every Noble had his strong Castle, where he reigned the 
cruel king of all the neighbouring people. Accordingly, he per- 
petrated whatever cruelties he chose. And never were worse cruel- 
ties committed upon earth than in wretched England in those 
nineteen years. 

The writers who were living then describe them fearfully. They 
say that the castles were filled with devils rather than with men ; 
that the peasants, men and women, were put into dungeons for 
their gold and silver, were tortured with fire and smoke, were hung 
up by the thumbs, were hung up by the heels with great weights 
to their heads, were torn with jagged irons, killed with hunger, 
broken to death in narrow chests filled with sharp-pointed stones, 
murdered in countless fiendish ways. In England there was no corn, 
no meat, no cheese, no butter, there were no tilled lands, no harvests. 



388 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Ashes of burnt towns, and dreary wastes, were all that the travel- 
ler, fearful of the robbers who prowled abroad at all hours, would 
see in a long day's journey ; and from sunrise until night, he would 
not come upon a home. 

The clergy sometimes suffered, and heavily too, from pillage, but 
many of them had castles of their own, and fought in helmet and 
armour like the barons, and drew lots with other fighting men for 
their share of booty. The Pope (or Bishop of Rome), on King 
Stephen's resisting his ambition, laid England under an Interdict 
at one period of this reign ; which means that he allowed no service 
to be performed in the churches, no couples to be married, no bells 
to be rung, no dead bodies to be buried. Any man having the 
power to refuse these things, no matter whether he were caUed a 
Pope or a Poulterer, would, of course, have the power of afflicting 
numbers of innocent people. That nothing might be wanting to the 
miseries of King Stephen's time, the Pope threw in this contribu- 
tion to the public store — not very like the widow's contribution, 
as I think, when Our Saviour sat in Jerusalem over-against the 
Treasury, " and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing." 



CHAPTER XII. 

england under henry the second. 
Part the First. 

Henry Plantagenet, when he was but twenty-one years old, 
quietly succeeded to the throne of England, according to his agree- 
ment made with the late King at Winchester. Six weeks after 
Stephen's death, he and his Queen, Eleanor, were crowned in that 
city ; into which they rode on horseback in great state, side by side, 
amidst much shouting and rejoicing, and clashing of music, and 
strewing of flowers. 

The reign of King Henry the Second began well. The King had 
great possessions, and (what with his own rights, and what with 
those of his wife) was lord of one-third part of France. He was a 
young man of vigour, ability, and resolution, and immediately 
applied himself to remove some of the evils which had arisen in the 
last unhappy reign. He revoked all the grants of land that had 
been hastily made, on either side, during the late struggles ; he 
obliged numbers of disorderly soldiers to depart from England ; he 
reclaimed all the castles belonging to the Crown ; and he forced 
the wicked nobles to pull down their own castles, to the number of 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 389 

eleven hundred, in which such dismal cruelties had been inflicted 
on the people. The King's brother, Geoffrey, rose against him 
in France, while he was so wtII employed, and rendered it necessary 
for him to repair to that country; where, after he had subdued 
and made a friendly arrangement with his brother (who did not 
live long), his ambition to increase his possessions involved him in 
a war with the French King, Louis, with whom he had been on 
such friendly terms just before, that to the French King's infant 
daughter, then a baby in the cradle, he had promised one of his 
little sons in marriage, who was a child of five years old. However, 
the war came to nothing at last, and the Pope made the two Kings 
friends again. 

Now, the clergy, in the troubles of the last reign, had gone on 
very ill indeed. There were all kinds of criminals among them — 
murderers, thieves, and vagabonds ; and the worst of the matter 
was, that the good priests would not give up the bad priests to 
justice, when they committed crimes, but persisted in sheltering 
and defending them. The King, well knowing that there could be 
no peace or rest in England while such things lasted, resolved to 
reduce the power of the clergy ; and, when he had reigned seven 
years, found (as he considered) a good opportunity for doing so, in 
the death of the Archbishop of Canterbury. " I will have for the 
new Archbishop," thought the King, "a friend in whom I can 
trust, who will help me to humble these rebellious priests, and to 
have them dealt with, when they do wrong, as other men who do 
wrong are dealt with." So, he resolved to make his favourite, the 
new Archbishop ; and this favourite was so extraordinary a man, and 
his story is so curious, that I must tell you all about him. 

Once upon a time, a worthy merchant of London, named Gilbert 
A Becket, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and was taken 
prisoner by a Saracen lord. This lord, who treated him kindly and 
not like a slave, had one fair daughter, who fell in love with the 
merchant ; and who told him that she wanted to become a Chris- 
tian, and was willing to marry him if they could fly to a Christian 
country. The merchant returned her love, until he found an op- 
portunity to escape, when he did not trouble himself about the 
Saracen lady, but escaped with his servant Richard, who had been 
taken prisoner along with him, and arrived in England and forgot 
her. The Saracen lady, who was more loving than the merchant, 
left her father's house in disguise to follow him, and made her way, 
under many hardships, to the sea-shore. The merchant had taught 
her only two English words (for I suppose he must have learnt the 
Saracen tongue himself, and made love in that language), of which 
London was one, and his own name, Gilbert, the other. She 



390 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

went among the ships, saying, " London ! London ! " over and over 
again, until the sailors understood that she wanted to find an 
English vessel that would carry her there; so they showed her 
such a ship, and she paid for her passage with some of her jewels, 
and sailed away. Well ! The merchant was sitting in his count- 
ing-house in London one day, when he heard a great noise in the 
street ; and presently Richard came running in from the warehouse, 
with his eyes wide open and his breath almost gone, saying, 
" Master, master, here is the Saracen lady ! " The merchant 
thought Ilichard was mad ; but Richard said, " No, master ! As 
I live, the Saracen lady is going up and down the city, calling 
Gilbert ! Gilbert ! " Then, he took the merchant by the sleeve, 
and pointed out at window; and there they saw her among the 
gables and water-spouts of the dark dirty street, in her foreign 
dress, so forlorn, surrounded by a wondering crowd, and passing 
slowly along, calling Gilbert, Gilbert ! When the merchant saw 
her, and thought of the tenderness she had shown him in his cap- 
tivity, and of her constancy, his heart was moved, and he ran 
down into the street ; and she saw him coming, and with a great 
cry fainted in his arms. They were married without loss of time, 
and Richard (who was an excellent man) danced with joy the 
whole day of the wedding; and they all lived happy ever after- 
wards. 

This merchant and this Saracen lady had one son, Thomas a 
Becket. He it was who became the Favourite of King Henry 
the Second. 

He had become Chancellor, when the King thought of making 
him Archbishop. He was clever, gay, well educated, brave; had 
fought in several battles in France ; had defeated a French knight 
in single combat, and brought his horse away as a token of the 
victory. He lived in a noble palace, he was the tutor of the 
young Prince Henry, he was served by one hundred and forty 
knights, his riches were immense. The King once sent him as his 
ambassador to France ; and the French people, beholding in what 
state he travelled, cried out in the streets, "How splendid must 
the King of England be, when this is only the Chancellor ! " They 
had good reason to wonder at the magnificence of Thomas h Becket, 
for, when he entered a French town, his procession was headed by 
two hundred and fifty singing boys ; then, came his hounds in 
couples ; then, eight waggons, each drawn by five horses driven by 
five drivers : two of the waggons filled with strong ale to be given 
away to the people ; four, with his gold and silver plate and stately 
clothes ; two, with the dresses of his numerous servants. Then, 
came twelve horses, each Avith a monkey on his back ; then, a train 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 391 

of people bearing shields and leading fine war-horses splendidly- 
equipped ; then, falconers with hawks upon their wrists ; then, a 
host of knights, and gentlemen and priests ; then, the Chancellor 
with his brilliant garments flashing in the sun, and aU the people 
capering and shouting with delight. 

The King was well pleased with all this, thinking that it only- 
made himself the more magnificent to have so magnificent a favour- 
ite ; but he sometimes jested with the Chancellor upon his splendour 
too. Once, when they were riding together through the streets of 
London in hard winter weather, they saw a shivering old man in 
rags. "Look at the poor object!" said the King. "Would it 
not be a charitable act to give that aged man a comfortable warm 
cloak?" "Undoubtedly it would," said Thomas h Becket, "and 
you do well. Sir, to think of such Christian duties." " Come ! " 
cried the King, "then give him your cloak!" It was made of 
rich crimson trimmed with ermine. The King tried to pull it off, 
the Chancellor tried to keep it on, both were near rolling from 
their saddles in the mud, when the Chancellor submitted, and the 
King gave the cloak to the old beggar : much to the beggar's as- 
tonishment, and much to the merriment of all the courtiers in 
attendance. For, courtiers are not only eager to laugh when the 
King laughs, but they really do enjoy a laugh against a Favourite. 

"I will make," thought King Henry the Second, "this Chan- 
cellor of mine, Thomas h, Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. He 
will then be the head of the Church, and, being devoted to me, 
will help me to correct the Church. He has always upheld my 
power against the power of the clergy, and once publicly told some 
bishops (I remember), that men of the Church were equally bound 
to me with men of the sword. Thomas a Becket is the man, of 
all other men in England, to help me in my great design." So 
the King, regardless of all objection, either that he was a fighting 
man, or a lavish man, or a courtly man, or a man of pleasure, or 
anything but a likely man for the office, made him Archbishop 
accordingly. 

Now, Thomas a Becket was proud and loved to be famous. He 
was already famous for the pomp of his life, for his riches, his gold 
and silver plate, his waggons, horses, and attendants. He could 
do no more in that way than he had done ; and being tired of that 
kind of fame (which is a very poor one), he longed to have his 
name celebrated for something else. Nothing, he knew, would 
render him so famous in the world, as the setting of his utmost 
power and ability against the utmost power and ability of the 
King. He resolved with the whole strength of his mind to do it. 

He may have had some secret grudge against the King besides. 



392 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

The King may have offended his proud humour at some time or 
other, for anything I know. I think it likely, because it is a com- 
mon thing for Kings, Princes, and other great people, to try the 
tempers of their favourites rather severely. Even the little affair 
of the crimson cloak must have been anything but a pleasant one 
to a haughty man. Thomas k Becket knew better than any one in 
England what the King expected of him. In all his sumptuous 
life, he had never yet been in a position to disappoint the King. 
He could take up that proud stand now, as head of the Ch\irch ; 
and he determined that it should be written in history, either that 
he subdued the King, or that the King subdued him. 

So, of a sudden, he completely altered the whole manner of his 
life. He turned off all his brilliant followers, ate coarse food, 
drank bitter w^ater, wore next his skin sackcloth covered with dirt 
and vermin (for it was then thought very religious to be very 
dirty), flogged his back to punish himself, lived chiefly in a little 
cell, washed the feet of thirteen poor people every day, and looked 
as miserable as he possibly could. If he had put twelve hundred 
monkeys on horseback instead of twelve, and had gone in proces- 
sion with eight thousand waggons instead of eight, he could not 
have half astonished the people so much as by this great change. 
It soon caused him to be more talked about as an Archbishop 
than he had been as a Chancellor. 

The King was very angry ; and was made still more so, when 
the new Archbishop, claiming various estates from the nobles as 
being rightfully Church property, required the King himself, for 
the same reason, to give up Rochester Castle, and Rochester City 
too. Not satisfied with this, he declared that no power but him- 
self should appoint a priest to any Church in the part of England 
over which he was Archbishop ; and when a certain gentleman of 
Kent made such an appointment, as he claimed to have the right 
to do, Thomas k Becket excommunicated him. 

Excommunication was, next to the Interdict I told you of at 
the close of the last chapter, the great weapon of the clergy. It 
consisted in declaring the person who was excommunicated, an 
outcast from the Church and from all religious oflfices ; and in 
cursing him all over, from the top of his head to the sole of his 
foot, whether he was standing up, lying down, sitting, kneeling, 
walking, running, hopping, jumping, gaping, coughing, sneezing, or 
whatever else he was doing. This unchristian nonsense would of 
course have made no sort of difference to the person cursed — who 
could say his prayers at home if he were shut out of church, and 
whom none but God could judge — but for the fears and supersti- 
tions of the people, who avoided excommunicated persons, and 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 393 

made their lives unhappy. So, the King said to the New Arch- 
bishop, " Take off" this Excommunication from this gentleman of 
Kent." To which the Archbishop replied, "I shall do no such 
thing." 

The quarrel went on. A priest in Worcestershire committed a 
most dreadful murder, that aroused the horror of the whole nation. 
The King demanded to have this wretch delivered up, to be tried 
in the same court and in the same way as any other murderer. 
The Archbishop refused, and kept him in the Bishop's prison. 
The King, holding a solemn assembly in Westminster Hall, de- 
manded that in future all priests found guilty before their Bishops 
of crimes against the law of the land should be considered priests 
no longer, and should be delivered over to the law of the land for 
punishment. The Archbishop again refused. The King required 
to know whether the clergy would obey the ancient customs of the 
country ? Every priest there, but one, said, after Thomas h Becket, 
" Saving my order." This really meant that they would only obey 
those customs when they did not interfere with their own claims ; 
and the King went out of the Hall in great wrath. 

Some of the clergy began to be afraid, now, that they were go- 
ing too far. Though Thomas k Becket was otherwise as unmoved 
as Westminster Hall, they prevailed upon him, for the sake of 
their fears, to go to the King at Woodstock, and promise to observe 
the ancient customs of the country, without saying anything about 
his order. The King received this submission favourably, and 
summoned a great council of the clergy to meet at the Castle of 
Clarendon, by Salisbury. But when the council met, the Arch- 
bishop again insisted on the words " saving my order ; " and he 
still insisted, though lords entreated him, and priests wept before 
him and knelt to him, and an adjoining room was thrown open, 
filled with armed soldiers of the King, to threaten him. At length 
he gave way, for that time, and the ancient customs (which in- 
cluded what the King had demanded in vain) were stated in writ- 
ing, and were signed and sealed by the chief of the clergy, and 
were called the Constitutions of Clarendon. 

The quarrel went on, for all that. The Archbishop tried to see 
the King. The King would not see him. The Archbishop tried 
to escape from England. The sailors on the coast would launch 
no boat to take him away. Then, he again resolved to do his 
worst in opposition to the King, and began openly to set the an- 
cient customs at defiance. 

The King summoned him before a great council at Northampton, 
where he accused him of high treason, and made a claim against 
him, which was not a just one, for an enormous sum of money. 



394 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Thomas k Becket was alone against the whole assembly, and the 
very Bishops advised him to resign his ofl&ce and abandon his con- 
test -vvith the King. His great anxiety and agitation stretched 
him on a sick-bed for two days, but he was still undaunted. He 
went to the adjourned council, carrying a great cross in his right 
hand, and sat down holding it erect before him. The King angrily 
retired into an inner room. The whole assembly angrily retired 
and left him there. But there he sat. The Bishops came out 
again in a body, and renounced him as a traitor. He only said, 
" I hear ! " and sat there still. They retired again into the inner 
room, and his trial proceeded without him. By-and-bye, the Earl 
of Leicester, heading the barons, came out to read his sentence. 
He refused to hear it, denied the power of the court, and said he 
would refer his cause to the Pope. As he walked out of the hall, 
with the cross in his hand, some of those present picked up rushes 
— rushes were strewn upon the floors in those days by way of car- 
pet — and threw them at him. He proudly turned his head, and 
said that were he not Archbishop, he would chastise those cowards 
with the sword he had known how to use in bygone days. He then 
mounted his horse, and rode away, cheered and surrounded by the 
common people, to whom he threw open his house that night and 
gave a supper, supping with them himself. That same night he 
secretly departed from the town ; and so, travelling by night and 
hiding by day, and calling himself "Brother Dearman," got away, 
not without difficulty, to Flanders. 

The struggle still went on. The angry King took possession of 
the revenues of the archbishopric, and banished all the relations 
and servants of Thomas k Becket, to the number of four hundred. 
The Pope and the French King both protected him, and an abbey 
was assigned for his residence. Stimulated by this support, Thomas 
k Becket, on a great festival day, formally proceeded to a great 
church crowded with people, and going up into the pulpit publicly 
cursed and excommunicated aU who had supported the Constitu- 
tions of Clarendon : mentioning many English noblemen by name, 
and not distantly hinting at the King of England himself. 

When intelligence of this new affront was carried to the King 
in his chamber, his passion was so furious that he tore his clothes, 
and rolled like a madman on his bed of straw and rushes. But he 
was soon up and doing. He ordered all the ports and coasts of 
England to be narrowly watched, that no letters of Interdict might 
be brought into the kingdom ; and sent messengers and bribes to 
the Pope's palace at Rome. Meanwhile, Thomas k Becket, for his 
part, was not idle at Rome, but constantly employed his utmost 
arts in his own behalf. Thus the contest stood, until there was 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 396 

peace between France and England (which had been for some time 
at war), and until the two children of the two Kings were married 
in celebration of it. Then, the French King brought about a meet- 
ing between Henry and his old favourite, so long his enemy. 

Even then, though Thomas h Becket knelt before the King, he 
was obstinate and immovable as to those words about his order. 
King Louis of France was weak enough in his veneration for 
Thomas a Becket and such men, but this was a little too much for 
him. He said that a Becket " wanted to be greater than the saints 
and better than St. Peter," and rode away from him with the King 
of England. His poor French Majesty asked k Becket's pardon 
for so doing, however, soon afterwards, and cut a very pitiful 
figure. 

At last, and after a world of trouble, it came to this. There 
was another meeting on French gi'ound between King Henry and 
Thomas k Becket, and it was agreed that Thomas k Becket should 
be Archbishop of Canterbury, according to the customs of former 
Archbishops, and that the King should put him in possession of 
the revenues of that post. And now, indeed, you might suppose 
the struggle at an end, and Thomas h Becket at rest. No, not 
even yet. For Thomas a Becket hearing, by some means, that 
King Henry, when he was in dread of his kingdom being placed 
under an interdict, had had his eldest son Prince Henry secretly 
crowned, not only persuaded the Pope to suspend the Archbishop 
of York who had performed that ceremony, and to excommunicate 
the Bishops who had assisted at it, but sent a messenger of his 
own into England, in spite of all the King's precautions along 
the coast, who delivered the letters of excommunication into the 
Bishops' o-^Ti hands. Thomas k Becket then came over to England 
himself, after an absence of seven years. He was privately warned 
that it was dangerous to come, and that an ireful knight, named 
Raxulf de Broc, had threatened that he should not live to eat a 
loaf of bread in England ; but he came. 

The common people received him well, and marched about with 
him in a soldierly way, armed with such rustic weapons as they 
could get. He tried to see the young prince who had once been 
his pupil, but was prevented. He hoped for some little support 
among the nobles and priests, but found none. He made the most 
of the peasants who attended him, and feasted them, and went from 
Canterbury to Harrow-on-the-Hill, and from Harrow-on-the-Hill 
back to Canterbury, and on Christmas Day preached in the Cathe- 
dral there, and told the people in his sermon that he had come to 
die among them, and that it was likely he would be murdered. 
He had no fear, however — or, if he had any, he had much more 



396 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

obstinacy — for he, then and there, excommunicated three of his 
enemies, of whom Ranulf de Broc the ireful knight was one. 

As men in general had no fancy for being cursed, in their sitting 
and walking, and gaping and sneezing, and all the rest of it, it was 
very natural in the persons so freely excommunicated to complain 
to the King. It was equally natural in the King, who had hoped 
that this troublesome opponent was at last quieted, to fall into a 
mighty rage when he heard of these new affronts ; and, on the 
Archbishop of York telling him that he never could hope for rest 
while Thomas k Becket lived, to cry out hastily before his court, 
" Have I no one here who will deliver me from this man ? " There 
were four knights present, who, hearing the King's words, looked 
at one another, and went out. 

The names of these knights were, Reginald Fitzukse, William 
Teacy, Hugh de Morville, and Richard Brito ; three of whom 
had been in the train of Thomas h Becket in the old days of his 
splendour. They rode away on horseback, in a very secret manner, 
and on the third day after Christmas Day arrived at Saltwood 
House, not far from Canterbury, which belonged to the family of 
Ranulf de Broc. They quietly collected some followers here, in 
case they should need any ; and proceeding to Canterbury, suddenly 
appeared (the four knights and twelve men) before the Archbishop, 
in his own house, at two o'clock in the afternoon. They neither 
bowed nor spoke, but sat down on the floor in silence, staring at 
the Archbishop. 

Thomas k Becket said, at length, "What do you want?" 

"We want," said Reginald Fitzurse, "the excommunication taken 
from the Bishops, and you to answer for your offences to the King." 

Thomas k Becket defiantly replied, that the power of the clergy 
was above the power of the King. That it was not for such men 
as they were, to threaten him. That if he were threatened by all 
the swords in England, he would never yield. 

" Then we will do more than threaten ! " said the knights. And 
they went out with the twelve men, and put on their armour, and 
drew their shining swords, and came back. 

His servants, in the meantime, had shut up and barred the great 
gate of the palace. At first, the knights tried to shatter it with 
their battle-axes ; but, being shown a window by which they could 
enter, they let the gate alone, and climbed in that way. While 
they were battering at the door, the attendants of Thomas k Becket 
had implored him to take refuge in the Cathedral; in which, as a 
sanctuary or sacred place, they thought the knights would dare to 
do no violent deed. He told them, again and again, that he would 
not stir. Hearing the distant voices of the monks singing the 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 397 

evening service, however, he said it was now his duty to attend, 
and therefore, and for no other reason, he would go. 

There was a near way between his Palace and the Cathedral, by 
some beautiful old cloisters which you may yet see. He went into 
the Cathedral, without any hurry, and having the Cross carried 
before him as usual. When he was safely there, his servants 
would have fastened the door, but he said No ! it was the house 
of God and not a fortress. 

As he spoke, the shadow of Reginald Fitzurse appeared in the 
Cathedral doorway, darkening the little light there was outside, on 
the dark winter evening. This knight said, in a strong voice, 
" Follow me, loyal servants of the King ! " The rattle of the 
armour of the other knights echoed through the Cathedral, as they 
came clashing in. 

It was so dark, in the lofty aisles and among the stately pillars 
of the church, and there were so many hiding-places in the crypt 
below and in the narrow passages above, that Thomas k Becket 
might even at that pass have saved himself if he would. But he 
would not. He told the monks resolutely that he would not. And 
though they all dispersed and left him there with no other follower 
than Edward Gryme, his faithful cross-bearer, he was as firm then, 
as ever he had been in his life. 

The knights came on, through the darkness, making a terrible 
noise with their armed tread upon the stone pavement of the 
church. " Where is the traitor 1 " they cried out. He made no 
answer. But when they cried, " Where is the Archbishop ? " he 
said proudly, " I am here ! " and came out of the shade and stood 
before them. 

The knights had no desire to kill him, if they could rid the King 
and themselves of him by any other means. They told him he 
must either fly or go with them. He said he would do neither ; 
and he threw William Tracy off with such force when he took hold 
of his sleeve, that Tracy reeled again. By his reproaches and his 
steadiness, he so incensed them, and exasperated their fierce humour, 
that Reginald Fitzurse, whom he called by an ill name, said, " Then 
die ! " and struck at his head. But the faithful Edward Gryme put 
out his arm, and there received the main force of the blow, so that 
it only made his master bleed. Another voice from among the 
knights again called to Thomas h Becket to fly; but, with his 
blood running down his face, and his hands clasped, and his head 
bent, he commended himself to God, and stood firm. Then they 
cruelly killed him close to the altar of St. Beunet ; and his body 
fell upon the pavement, which was dirtied with his blood and 
brains. 



398 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

It is an awful thing to think of the murdered mortal, who had 
so showered his curses about, lying, all disfigured, in the church, 
where a few lamps here and there were but red specks on a pall of 
darkness ; and to think of the guilty knights riding away on horse- 
back, looking over their shoulders at the dim Cathedral, and re- 
membering what they had left inside. 

Paet the Second. 

When the King heard how Thomas k Becket had lost his life in 
Canterbury Cathedral, through the ferocity of the four Knights, he 
was filled with dismay. Some have supposed that when the King 
spoke those hasty words, " Have I no one here who will deliver 
me from this man 1 " he wished, and meant k Becket to be slain. 
But few things are more unlikely ; for, besides that the King was 
not naturally cruel (though very passionate), he was wise, and 
must have known full well what any stupid man in his dominions 
must have known, namely, that such a murder would rouse the 
Pope and the whole Church against him. 

He sent respectful messengers to the Pope, to represent his inno- 
cence (except in having uttered the hasty words) ; and he swore 
solemnly and publicly to his innocence, and contrived in time to 
make his peace. As to the four guilty Knights, who fled into 
Yorkshire, and never again dared to show themselves at Court, the 
Pope excommunicated them ; and they lived miserably for some 
time, shunned by all their countrymen. At last, they went humbly 
to Jerusalem as a penance, and there died and were buried. 

It happened, fortunately for the pacifying of the Pope, that an 
opportunity arose very soon after the murder of h Becket, for the 
King to declare his power in Ireland — which was an acceptable 
undertaking to the Pope, as the Irish, who had been converted to 
Christianity by one Patricius (otherwise Saint Patrick) long ago, 
before any Pope existed, considered that the Pope had nothing at 
all to do with them, or they with the Pope, and accordingly refused 
to pay him Peter's Pence, or that tax of a penny a house which I 
have elsewhere mentioned. The King's opportunity arose in this 
way. 

The Irish were, at that time, as barbarous a people as you can 
well imagine. They were continually quarrelling and fighting, cut- 
ting one another's .throats, slicing one another's noses, burning one 
another's houses, carrying away one another's wives, and commit- 
ting all sorts of violence. The country was divided into five king- 
doms — Desmond, Thomond, Connaught, Ulster, and Leinster 
— each governed by a separate King, of whom one claimed to be 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 399 

the chief of the rest. Now, one of these Kings, named Der- 
MOND Mac Murrough (a wild kind of name, spelt in more than 
one wild kind of way), had carried off the wife of a friend of his, 
and concealed her on an island in a bog. The friend resenting 
this (though it was quite the custom of the country), complained 
to the chief King, and, with the chief King's help, drove Dermond 
Mac Murrough out of his dominions. Dermond came over to Eng- 
land for revenge ; and offered to hold his realm as a vassal of 
King Henry, if King Henry would help him to regain it. The 
King consented to these terms ; but only assisted him, then, with 
what were called Letters Patent, authorising any English subjects 
who were so disposed, to enter into his service, and aid his cause. 

There was, at Bristol, a certain Earl Eichard de Clare, called 
Strongbow ; of no very good character ; needy and desperate, and 
ready for anything that offered him a chance of improving his fort- 
unes. There were, in South Wales, two other broken knights of 
the same good-for-nothing sort, called Robert Fitz-Stephen, and 
Maurice Fitz-Gerald. These three, each with a small band of 
followers, took up Dermond's cause ; and it was agreed that if it 
proved successful, Strongbow should marry Dermond's daughter 
Eva, and be declared his heir. 

The trained English followers of these knights were so superior 
in all the discipline of battle to the Irish, that they beat them 
against immense superiority of numbers. In one fight, early in the 
war, they cut off three hundred heads, and laid them before Mac 
Murrough ; who turned them every one up with his hands, rejoic- 
ing, and, coming to one which was the head of a man whom he had 
m.uch disliked, grasped it by the hair and ears, and tore off the nose 
and lips with his teeth. You may judge from this, what kind of a 
gentleman an Irish King in those times was. The captives, all 
through this war, were horribly treated ; the victorious party mak- 
ing nothing of breaking their limbs, and casting them into the sea 
from the tops of high rocks. It was in the midst of the miseries 
and cruelties attendant on the taking of Waterford, where the dead 
lay piled in the streets, and the filthy gutters ran with blood, that 
Strongbow married Eva. An odious marriage-company those 
mounds of corpses must have made, I think, and one quite worthy 
of the young lady's father. 

He died, after Waterford and Dublin had been taken, and vari- 
ous successes achieved ; and Strongbow became King of Leinster. 
Now came King Henry's opportunity. To restrain the growing 
power of Strongbow, he himself repaired to Dublin, as Strongbow's 
Royal Master, and deprived him of his kingdom, but confirmed him 
in the enjoyment of great possessions. The King, then, holding 



400 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

state in Dublin, received the homage of nearly all the Irish Kings 
and Chiefs, and so came home again with a great addition to his 
reputation as Lord of Ireland, and with a new claim on the favour 
of the Pope. And now, their reconciliation was completed — - more 
easily and mildly by the Pope, than the King might have expected, 
I think. 

At this period of his reign, when his troubles seemed so few and 
his prospects so bright, those domestic miseries began which gradu- 
ally made the King the most unhappy of men, reduced his great 
spirit, wore away his health, and broke his heart. 

He had four sons. Henry, now aged eighteen — his secret 
crowning of whom had given such offence to Thomas h, Becket ; 
KicHARD, aged sixteen ; Geoffrey, fifteen ; and John, his favour- 
ite, a young boy whom the courtiers named Lackland, because 
he had no inheritance, but to whom the King meant to give the 
Lordship of Ireland. All these misguided boys, in their turn, were 
unnatural sons to him, and unnatural brothers to each other. 
Prince Henry, stimulated by the French King, and by his bad 
mother, Queen Eleanor, began the undutiful history. 

First, he demanded that his young wife, Margaret, the French 
King's daughter, should be crowned as well as he. His father, the 
King, consented, and it was done. It was no sooner done, than he 
demanded to have a part of his father's dominions, during his 
father's life. This being refused, he made off from his father in 
the night, with his bad heart full of bitterness, and took refuge at 
the French King's Court. Within a day or two, his brothers Eich- 
ard and Geoffrey followed. Their mother tried to join them — 
escaping in man's clothes — but she was seized by King Henry's 
men, and immured in prison, where she lay, deservedly, for sixteen 
years. Every day, however, some grasping English noblemen, to 
whom the King's protection of his people from their avarice and 
oppression had given offence, deserted him and joined the Princes. 
Every day he heard some fresh intelligence of the Princes levying 
armies against him ; of Prince Henry's wearing a crown before his 
own ambassadors at the French Court, and being called the Junior 
King of England ; of all the Princes swearing never to make peace 
with him, their father, without the consent and approval of the 
Barons of France. But, with his fortitude and energy unshaken. 
King Henry met the shock of these disasters with a resolved and 
cheerful face. He called upon all Royal fathers who had sons, to 
help him, for his cause was theirs; he hired, out of his riches, 
twenty thousand men to fight the false French King, who stirred 
his own blood against him ; and he carried on the war with such 
vigour, that Louis soon proposed a conference to treat for peace. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 401 

The conference was held beneath an old wide-spreading green 
elm-tree, upon a plain in France. It led to nothing. The war re- 
commenced. Prince Richard began his fighting career, by leading 
an army against his father ; but his father beat him and his army 
back ; and thousands of his men would have rued the day in which 
they fought in such a wicked cause, had not the King received news 
of an invasion of England by the Scots, and promptly come home 
through a great storm to repress it. And whether he really began 
to fear that he suffered these troubles because h Becket had been 
murdered ; or whether he wished to rise in the favour of the Pope, 
who had now declared k Becket to be a saint, or in the favour of 
his own people, of whom many believed that even h Becket's sense- 
less tomb could work miracles, I don't know : but the King no 
sooner landed in England than he went straight to Canterbury ; and 
when he came within sight of the distant Cathedral, he dismounted 
from his horse, took off his shoes, and v/alked with bare and bleed- 
ing feet to h Becket's grave. There, he lay down on the ground, 
lamenting, in the jDresence of many people ; and by-and-bye he went 
into the Chapter House, and, removing his clothes from his back 
and shoulders, submitted himself to be beaten with knotted cords 
(not beaten very hard, I dare say though) by eighty Priests, one 
after another. It chanced that on the very day when the King 
made this curious exhibition of himself, a complete victory was 
obtained over the Scots ; which very much delighted the Priests, 
who said that it was won because of his great example of repent- 
ance. For the Priests in general had found out, since k Becket's 
death, that they admired him of all things — though they had hated 
him very cordially when he was alive. 

The Earl of Flanders, who was at the head of the base conspir- 
acy of the King's undutiful sons and their foreign friends, took the 
opportunity of the King being thus employed at home, to lay siege 
to Rouen, the capital of Normandy. But the King, who was ex- 
traordinarily quick and active in all his movements, was at Rouen, 
too, before it was supposed possible that he could have left Eng- 
land ; and there he so defeated the said Earl of Flanders, that the 
conspirators proposed peace, and his bad sons Henry and Geoffrey 
submitted. Richard resisted for six weeks ; but, being beaten out 
of castle after castle, he at last submitted too, and his father for- 
gave him. 

To forgive these unworthy princes was only to afford them breath- 
ing-time for new faithlessness. They were so false, disloyal, and 
dishonourable, that they were no more to be trusted than common 
thieves. In the very next year, Prince Henry rebelled again, and 
was again forgiven. In eight years more. Prince Richard rebelled 
2d 



402 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

against his elder brother; and Prince Geoffrey infamously said 
that the brothers could never agree well together, unless they were 
united against their father. In the very next year after their 
reconciliation by the King, Prince Henry again rebelled against his 
father ; and again submitted, swearing to be true ; and was again 
forgiven; and again rebelled with Geoffrey. 

But the end of this perfidious Prince was come. He fell sick at 
a French town ; and his conscience terribly reproaching him with 
his baseness, he sent messengers to the King his father, imploring 
him to come and see him, and to forgive him for the last time on 
his bed of death. The generous King, who had a royal and forgiv- 
ing mind towards his children always, would have gone ; but this 
Prince had been so unnatural, that the noblemen about the King 
suspected treachery, and represented to him that he could not safely 
trust his life with such a traitor, though his own eldest son. There- 
fore the King sent him a ring from off his finger as a token of for- 
giveness ; and when the Prince had kissed it, with much grief and 
many tears, and had confessed to those around him how bad, and 
wicked, and undutiful a son he had been ; he said to the attendant 
Priests : " 0, tie a rope about my body, and draw me out of bed, 
and lay me down upon a bed of ashes, that I may die with prayers 
to God in a repentant manner ! " And so he died, at twenty-seven 
years old. 

Three years afterwards. Prince Geoffrey, being unhorsed at a tour- 
nament, had his brains trampled out by a crowd of horses pass- 
ing over him. So, there only remained Prince Richard, and Prince 
John — who had grown to be a young man now, and had solemnly 
sworn to be faithful to his father. Richard soon rebelled again, 
encouraged by his friend the French King, Philip the Second 
(son of Louis, who was dead) ; and soon submitted and was again 
forgiven, swearing on the New Testament never to rebel again ; and 
in another year or so, rebelled again ; and, in the presence of his 
father, knelt down on his knee before the King of France ; and did 
the French King homage; and declared that with his aid he would 
possess himself, by force, of all his father's French dominions. 

And yet this Richard called himself a soldier of Our Saviour ! 
And yet this Richard wore the Cross, which the Kings of France 
and England had both taken, in the previous year, at a brotherly 
meeting underneath the old wide-spreading elm-tree on the plain, 
when they had sworn (like him) to devote themselves to a new 
Crusade, for the love and honour of the Truth ! 

Sick at heart, wearied out by the falsehood of his sons, and 
almost ready to lie down and die, the unhappy King who had so 
long stood firm, began to fail. But the Pope, to his honour, sup- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 403 

ported him ; and obliged the French King and Richard, though suc- 
cessful in fight, to treat for peace. Richard wanted to be crowned 
King of England, and pretended that he wanted to be married (which 
he really did not) to the French King's sister, his promised wife, 
whom King Henry detained in England. King Henry wanted, on 
the other hand, that the French King's sister should be married to 
his favourite son, John : the only one of his sons (he said) who had 
never rebelled against him. At last King Henry, deserted by his 
nobles one by one, distressed, exhausted, broken-hearted, consented 
to establish peace. 

One final heavy sorrow was reserved for him, even yet. When 
they brought him the proposed treaty of peace, in writing, as he lay 
very ill in bed, they brought him also the list of the deserters from 
their allegiance, whom he was required to pardon. The first name 
upon this list was John, his favourite son, in whom he had trusted 
to the last. 

" John ! child of my heart ! " exclaimed the King, in a great 
agony of mind. " John, whom I have loved the best ! John, 
for whom I have contended through these many troubles ! Have 
you betrayed me too ! " And then he lay down with a heavy groan, 
and said, " Now let the world go as it will. I care for nothing 
more ! " 

After a time, he told his attendants to take him to the French 
town of Chinon — a town he had been fond of, during many years. 
But he was fond of no place now ; it was too true that he could 
care for nothing more upon this earth. He wildly cursed the hour 
when he was born, and cursed the children whom he left behind 
him ; and expired. 

As, one hundred years before, the servile followers of the Court 
had abandoned the Conqueror in the hour of his death, so they now 
abandoned his descendant. The very body was stripped, in the 
plunder of the Royal chamber ; and it was not easy to find the 
means of carrying it for burial to the abbey church of Fontevraud. 

Richard was said in after years, by way of flattery, to have the 
heart of a Lion. It would have been far better, I think, to have 
had the heart of a Man. His heart, whatever it was, had cause to 
beat remorsefully within his breast, when he came — as he did — 
into the solemn abbey, and looked on his dead father's uncovered 
face. His heart, whatever it was, had been a black and perjured 
heart, in all its dealings with the deceased King, and more defi- 
cient in a single touch of tenderness than any wild beast's in the 
forest. 

There is a pretty story told of this Reign, called the story of 
Faie Rosamond. It relates how the King doted on Fair Rosa- 



404 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

mond, who was the loveliest girl in all the world ; and how he had 
a beautiful Bower built for her in a Park at Woodstock ; and how 
it was erected in a labyrinth, and could only be found by a clue of 
silk. How the bad Queen Eleanor, becoming jealous of Fair Rosa- 
mond, found out the secret of the clue, and one day, appeared be- 
fore her, with a dagger and a cup of poison, and left her to the 
choice between those deaths. How Fair Eosamond, after shedding 
many piteous tears and offering many useless prayers to the cruel 
Queen, took the poison, and fell dead in the midst of the beautiful 
bower, while the unconscious birds sang gaily all around her. 

Now, there was a fair Rosamond and she was (I dare say) the 
loveliest girl in all the world, and the King was certainly very 
fond of her, and the bad Queen Eleanor was certainly made jealous. 
But I am afraid — I say afraid, because I like the story so much 
— that there was no bower, no labyrinth, no silken clue, no dag- 
ger, no poison. I am afraid fair Rosamond retired to a nunnery 
near Oxford, and died there, peaceably ; her sister-nuns hanging a 
silken drapery over her tomb, and often dressing it with flowers, 
in remembrance of the youth and beauty that had enchanted the 
King when he too was young, and when his life lay fair before 
him. 

It was dark and ended now ; faded and gone. Henry Plantag- 
enet lay quiet in the abbey church of Fontevraud, in the fifty-sev- 
enth year of his age — never to be completed — after governing 
England well, for nearly thirty-five years. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

ENGLAND UNDER EICHAED THE FIEST, CALLED THE LION-HEAET. 

In the year of our Lord one thousand one hundred and eighty- 
nine, Richard of the Lion Heart succeeded to the throne of King 
Henry the Second, whose paternal heart he had done so much to 
break. He had been, as we have seen, a rebel from his boyhood ; 
but, the moment he became a king against whom others might re- 
bel, he found out that rebellion was a great wickedness. In the 
heat of this pious discovery, he punished all the leading people 
who had befriended him against his father. He could scarcely 
have done anything that would have been a better instance of his 
real nature, or a better warning to fawners and parasites not to 
trust in lion-hearted princes. 

He likewise put his late father's treasurer in chains, and locked 
him up in a dungeon from which he was not set free until he had 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 405 

relinquished, not only all the Crown treasure, but all his own 
money too. So, Richard certainly got the Lion's share of the 
wealth of this wretched treasurer, whether he had a Lion's heart 
or not. 

He was crowned King of England, with great pomp, at West- 
minster : walking to the Cathedral under a silken canopy stretched 
on the tops of four lances, each carried by a great lord. On the 
day of his coronation, a dreadful murdering of the Jews took place, 
which seems to have given great delight to numbers of savage per- 
sons calling themselves Christians. The King had issued a proc- 
lamation forbidding the Jews (who were generally hated, though 
they were the most useful merchants in England) to appear at the 
ceremony ; but as they had assembled in London from all parts, 
bringing presents to show their respect for the new Sovereign, 
some of them ventured down to Westminster Hall with their gifts ; 
which were very readily accepted. It is supposed, now, that some 
noisy fellow in the crowd, pretending to be a very delicate Chris- 
tian, set up a howl at this, and struck a Jew who was trying to 
get in at the Hall door with his present. A riot arose. The Jews 
who had got into the Hall, were driven forth ; and some of the 
rabble cried out that the new King had commanded the unbelieving 
race to be put to death. Thereupon the crowd rushed through 
the narrow streets of the city, slaughtering all the Jews they met ; 
and when they could find no more out of doors (on account of their 
having fled to their houses, and fastened themselves in), they ran 
madly about, breaking open all the houses where the Jews lived, 
rushing in and stabbing or spearing them, sometimes even flinging 
old people and children out of window into blazing fires they had 
lighted up below. This great cruelty lasted four-and-twenty hours, 
and only three men were punished for it. Even they forfeited 
their lives not for murdering and robbing the Jews, but for burn- 
ing the houses of some Christians. 

King Richard, who was a strong restless burly man, with one 
idea always in his head, and that the very troublesome idea of 
breaking the heads of other men, was mightily impatient to go on 
a Crusade to the Holy Land, with a great army. As great armies 
could not be raised to go, even to the Holy Land, without a great 
deal of money, he sold the Crown domains, and even the high offices 
of State ; recklessly appointing noblemen to rule over his English 
subjects, not because they were fit to govern, but because they could 
pay high for the privilege. In this way, and by selling pardons at 
a dear rate, and by varieties of avarice and oppression, he scraped 
together a large treasure. He then appointed two Bishops to take 
care of his kingdom in his absence, and gave great powers and pos- 



406 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

sessions to his brother John, to secure his friendship. John would 
rather have been made Eegent of England ; but he was a sly man, 
and friendly to the expedition ; saying to himself, no doubt, " The 
more fighting, the more chance of my brother being killed ; and 
when he is killed, then I become King John ! " 

Before the newly levied army departed from England, the recruits 
and the general populace distinguished themselves by astonishing 
cruelties on the unfortunate Jews : whom, in many large towns, they ' 
murdered by hundreds in the most horrible manner. 

At York, a large body of Jews took refuge in the Castle, in the 
absence of its Governor, after the wives and children of many of 
them had been slain before their eyes. Presently came the Gov- 
ernor, and demanded admission. "How can we give it thee, 
Governor ! " said the Jews upon the walls, " when, if we open the 
gate by so much as the width of a foot, the roaring crowd behind 
thee will press in and kill us ? " 

Upon this, the unjust Governor became angry, and told the peo- 
ple that he approved of their killing those Jews ; and a mischiev- 
ous maniac of a friar, dressed all in white, put himself at the head 
of the assault, and they assaulted the Castle for three days. 

Then said Jocen, the head-Jew (who was a rabbi or Priest), to 
the rest, " Brethren, there is no hope for us with the Christians 
who are hammering at the gates and walls, and who must soon 
break in. As we and our wives and children must die, either by 
Christian hands, or by our own, let it be by our own. Let us de- 
stroy by fire what jewels and other treasure we have here, then fire 
the castle, and then perish ! " 

A few could not resolve to do this, but the greater part complied. 
They made a blazing heap of all their valuables, and, when those 
were consumed, set the castle in flames. While the flames roared 
and crackled around them, and shooting up into the sky turned it 
blood-red, Jocen cut the throat of his beloved wife, and stabbed 
himself All the others who had wives or children, did the like 
dreadful deed. When the populace broke in, they found (except 
the trembling few, cowering in corners, whom they soon killed) only 
heaps of greasy cinders, with here and there something like part of 
the blackened trunk of a burnt tree, but which had lately been a 
human creature, formed by the beneficent hand of the Creator as 
they were. 

After this bad beginning, Richard and his troops went on, in no 
very good manner, with the Holy Crusade. It was undertaken 
jointly by the King of England and his old friend Philip of France. 
They commenced the business by reviewing their forces, to the num- 
ber of one hundred thousand men. Afterwards, they severally em- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 407 

barked their troops for Messina, in Sicily, which was appointed as 
the next place of meeting. 

King Richard's sister had married the King of this place, but he 
was dead : and his uncle Tancred had usurped the crown, cast the 
Royal Widow into prison, and possessed himself of her estates. 
Richard fiercely demanded his sister's release, the restoration of her 
lands, and (according to the Royal custom of the Island) that she 
should have a golden chair, a golden table, four-and-twenty silver 
cups, and four-and-twenty silver dishes. As he was too powerful 
to be successfully resisted, Tancred yielded to his demands; and 
then the French King grew jealous, and complained that the Eng- 
lish King wanted to be absolute in the Island of Messina and every- 
where else. Richard, however, cared little or nothing for this com- 
plaint ; and in consideration of a present of twenty thousand pieces 
of gold, promised his pretty little nephew Aethue, then a child of 
two years old, in marriage to Tancred's daughter. We shall hear 
again of pretty little Arthur by-and-bye. 

This Sicilian affair arranged without anybody's brains being 
knocked out (which must have rather disappointed him), King 
Richard took his sister away, and also a fair lady named Beeen- 
GAEiA, with whom he had fallen in love in France, and whom his 
mother, Queen Eleanor (so long in prison, you remember, but re- 
leased by Richard on his coming to the Throne), had brought out 
there to be his wife ; and sailed with them for Cyprus. 

He soon had the pleasure of fighting the King of the Island of 
Cyprus, for allowing his subjects to pillage some of the English 
troops who were shipwrecked on the shore ; and easily conquering 
this poor monarch, he seized his only daughter, to be a companion 
to the lady Berengaria, and put the King himself into silver fetters. 
He then sailed away again with his mother, sister, wife, and the 
captive princess ; and soon arrived before the town of Acre, which 
the French King with his fleet was besieging from the sea. But 
the French King was in no triumphant condition, for his army had 
been thinned by the swords of the Saracens, and wasted by the 
plague ; and Saladin, the brave Sultan of the Turks, at the head 
of a numerous army, was at that time gallantly defending the place 
from the hills that rise above it. 

Wherever the united army of Crusaders went, they agreed in few 
points except in gaming, drinking, and quarrelling, in a most un- 
holy manner ; in debauching the people among whom they tarried, 
whether they were friends or foes ; and in carrying disturbance 
and ruin into quiet places. The French King was jealous of the 
English King, and the English King was jealous of the French 
King, and the disorderly and violent soldiers of the two nations 



408 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

were jealous of one another; consequently, the two Kings could 
not at first agree, even upon a joint assault on Acre ; but when 
they did make up their quarrel for that purpose, the Saracens 
promised to yield the town, to give up to the Christians the wood 
of the Holy Cross, to set at liberty all their Christian captives, and 
to pay two hundred thousand pieces of gold. All this was to be 
done within forty days ; but, not being done, King Eichard ordered 
some three thousand Saracen prisoners to be brought out in the 
front of his camp, and there, in fuU view of their own countrymen, 
to be butchered. 

The French King had no part in this crime ; for h'e was by that 
time travelling homeward with the greater part of his men ; being 
offended by the overbearing conduct of the English King ; being 
anxious to look after his own dominions ; and being ill, besides, from 
the unwholesome air of that hot and sandy country. King Eichard 
carried on the war without him ; and remained in the East, meet- 
ing with a variety of adventures, nearly a year and a half. Every 
night when his army was on the march, and came to a halt, the 
heralds cried out three times, to remind all the soldiers of the cause 
in which they were engaged, " Save the Holy Sepulchre ! " and 
then all the soldiers knelt and said " Amen ! " Marching or en- 
camping, the army had continually to strive with the hot air of 
the glaring desert, or with the Saracen soldiers animated and 
directed by the brave Saladin, or with both together. Sickness 
and death, battle and wounds, were always among them; but 
through every difficulty King Eichard fought like a giant, and 
worked like a common labourer. Long and long after he was 
quiet in his grave, his terrible battle-axe, with twenty English 
pounds of English steel in its mighty head, was a legend among 
the Saracens ; and when all the Saracen and Christian hosts had 
been dust for many a year, if a Saracen horse started at any object 
by the wayside, his rider would exclaim, "What dost thou fear, 
Fool ? Dost thou think King Eichard is behind it 1 " 

No one admired this King's renown for bravery more than Sala- 
din himself, who was a generous and gallant enemy. When Eich- 
ard lay ill of a fever, Saladin sent him fresh fruits from Damascus, 
and snow from the mountain-tops. Courtly messages and compli- 
ments were frequently exchanged between them — and then King 
Eichard would mount his horse and kill as many Saracens as he 
could; and Saladin would mount his, and kill as many Christians 
as he could. In this way King Eichard fought to his heart's con- 
tent at Arsoof and at Jaffa ; and finding himself with nothing ex- 
citing to do at Ascalon, except to rebuild, for his own defence, some 
fortifications there which the Saracens had destroyed, he kicked 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 409 

his ally the Duke of Austria, for being too proud to work at 
••them. 

The army at last came within sight of the Holy City of Jeru- 
salem ; but, being then a mere nest of jealousy, and quarrelling and 
fighting, soon retired, and agreed with the Saracens upon a truce 
for three years, three months, three days, and three hours. Then, 
the English Christians, protected by the noble Saladin from Saracen 
revenge, visited Our Saviour's tomb ; and then King Richard em- 
barked with a small force at Acre to return home. 

But he was shipwrecked in the Adriatic Sea, and was fain to 
pass through Germany, under an assumed name. Now, there were 
many people in Germany who had served in the Holy Land under 
that proud Duke of Austria who had been kicked ; and some of 
them, easily recognising a man so remarkable as King Richard, 
carried their intelligence to the kicked Duke, who straightway took 
him prisoner at a little inn near Vienna. 

The Duke's master the Emperor of Germany, and the King of 
France, were equally delighted to have so troublesome a monarch 
in safe keeping. Friendships which are founded on a partnership 
in doing wrong, are never true ; and the King of France was now 
quite as heartily King Richard's foe, as he had ever been his friend 
in his unnatural conduct to his father. He monstrously pretended 
that King Richard had designed to poison him in the East; he 
charged him with having murdered, there, a man whom he had in 
truth befriended ; he bribed the Emperor of Germany to keep him 
close prisoner; and, finally, through the plotting of these two 
princes, Richard was brought before the German legislature, charged 
with the foregoing crimes, and many others. But he defended 
himself so well, that many of the assembly were moved to tears 
by his eloquence and earnestness. It was decided that he should 
be treated, during the rest of his captivity, in a manner more be- 
coming his dignity than he had been, and that he should be set 
free on the payment of a heavy ransom. This ransom the English 
people willingly raised. When Queen Eleanor took it over to 
Germany, it was at first evaded and refused. But she appealed 
to the honour of all the princes of the German Empire in behalf 
of her son, and appealed so well that it was accepted, and the King 
released. Thereupon, the King of France wrote to Prince John — 
" Take care of thyself The devil is unchained ! " 

Prince John had reason to fear his brother, for he had been a 
traitor to him in his captivity. He had secretly joined the French 
King ; had vowed to the English nobles and people that his brother 
was dead ; and had vainly tried to seize the crown. He was now 
in France, at a place called Evreux. Being the meanest and bas- 



410 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

est of men, he contrived a mean and base expedient for making 
himself acceptable to his brother. He invited the French officers 
of the garrison in that town to dinner, murdered them all, and then 
took the fortress. With this recommendation to the good will of 
a lion-hearted monarch, he hastened to King Eichard, fell on his 
knees before him, and obtained the intercession of Queen Eleanor. 
" I forgive him," said the King, " and I hope I may forget the in- 
jury he has done me, as easily as I know he will forget my pardon." 

While King Richard was in Sicily, there had been trouble in his 
dominions at home : one of the bishops whom he had left in charge 
thereof, arresting the other ; and making, in his pride and ambition, 
as great a show as if he were King himself But the King hearing 
of it at Messina, and appointing a new Regency, this Longchamp 
(for that was his name) had fled to France in a woman's dress, and 
had there been encouraged and supported by the French King. 
With all these causes of ofi'ence against Philip in his mind. King 
Richard had no sooner been welcomed home by his enthusiastic 
subjects with great display and splendour, and had no sooner been 
crowned afresh at Winchester, than he resolved to show the Frencli 
King that the devil was unchained indeed, and made war against 
him with great fury. 

There was fresh trouble at home about this time, arising out of 
the discontents of the poor people, who complained that they were 
far more heavily taxed than the rich, and who found a spirited 
champion in William Fitz-Osbert, called Longbeard. He be- 
came the leader of a secret society, comprising fifty thousand men ; 
he was seized by surprise; he stabbed the citizen who first laid 
hands upon him ; and retreated, bravely fighting, to a church, 
which he maintained four days, until he was dislodged by fire, and 
run through the body as he came out. He was not killed, though ; 
for he was dragged, half dead, at the tail of a horse to Smithfield, 
and there hanged. Death was long a favourite remedy for silenc- 
ing the people's advocates ; but as we go on with this history, I 
fancy we shall find them difficult to make an end of, for all that. 

The French war, delayed occasionally by a truce, was still in 
progress when a certain Lord named Vidomar, Viscount of Li- 
moges, chanced to find in his ground a treasure of ancient coins. As 
the King's vassal, he sent the King half of it; but the King 
claimed the whole. The lord refused to yield the whole. The 
King besieged the lord in his castle, swore that he would take the 
castle by storm, and hang every man of its defenders on the bat- 
tlements. 

There was a strange old song in that part of the country, to the 
eflfect that in Limoges an arrow would be made by which King 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 411 

Richard would die. It may be that Berteand de Gourdon, a 
young man who was one of the defenders of the castle, had often 
sung it or heard it sung of a winter night, and remembered it 
when he saw, from his post upon the ramparts, the King attended 
only by his chief officer riding below the walls surveying the place. 
He drew an arrow to the head, took steady aim, said between his 
teeth, " Now I pray God speed thee well, arrow ! " discharged it, 
and struck the King in the left shoulder. 

Although the wound was not at first considered dangerous, it 
was severe enough to cause the King to retire to his tent, and 
direct the assault to be made without him. The castle was taken ; 
and every man of its defenders was hanged, as the King had sworn 
all should be, except Bertrand de Gourdon, who was reserved until 
the royal pleasure respecting him should be known. 

By that time unskilful treatment had made the wound mortal, 
and the King knew that he was dying. He directed Bertrand to 
be brought into his tent. The young man was brought there, heav- 
ily chained. King Richard looked at him steadily. He looked, 
as steadily, at the King. 

" Knave ! " said King Richard. " What have I done to thee that 
thou shouldest take my life 1 " 

" What hast thou done to me ? " replied the young man. " With 
thine own hands thou hast killed my father and my two brothers. 
Myself thou wouldest have hanged. Let me die now, by any tort- 
ure that thou wilt. My comfort is, that no torture can save 
Thee. Thou too must die; and, through me, the world is quit 
of thee ! " 

Again the King looked at the young man steadily. Again the 
young man looked steadily at him. Perhaps some remembrance of 
his generous enemy Saladin, who was not a Christian, came into 
the mind of the dying King. 

" Youth ! " he said, " I forgive thee. Go unhurt ! " 

Then, turning to the chief officer who had been riding in his 
company when he received the wound. King Richard said : 

''Take off his chains, give him a hundred shillings, and let him 
depart." 

He sunk down on his couch, and a dark mist seemed in his 
weakened eyes to fill the tent wherein he had so often rested, and 
he died. His age was forty-two ; he had reigned ten years. His 
last command was not obeyed ; for the chief officer flayed Bertrand 
de Gourdon alive, and hanged him. 

There is an old tune yet known — a sorrowful air will some- 
times outlive many generations of strong men, and even last longer 
than battle-axes with twenty pounds of steel in the head — by 



412 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

which this King is said to have been discovered in his captivity. 
Blondel, a favourite Minstrel of King Richard, as the story re- 
lates, faithfully seeking his Royal master, went singing it outside 
the gloomy walls of many foreign fortresses and prisons ; until at 
last he heard it echoed from within a dungeon, and knew the voice, 
and cried out in ecstasy, "0 Richard, my King !" You may 
believe it, if you like ; it would be easy to believe worse things. 
Richard was himself a Minstrel and a Poet. If he had not been 
a Prince too, he might have been a better man perhaps, and might 
have gone out of the world with less bloodshed and waste of life 
to answer for. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

ENGLAND UNDER KING JOHN, CALLED LACKLAND. 

At two-and-thirty years of age, John became King of England. 
His pretty little nephew Arthue had the best claim to the throne ; 
but John seized the treasure, and made fine promises to the nobil- 
ity, and got himself crowned at Westminster within a few weeks 
after his brother Richard's death. I doubt whether the crown 
could possibly have been put upon the head of a meaner coward, or 
a more detestable villain, if England had been searched from end to 
end to find him out. 

The French King, Philip, refused to acknowledge the right of 
John to his new dignity, and declared in favour of Arthur. You 
must not suppose that he had any generosity of feeling for the 
fatherless boy ; it merely suited his ambitious schemes to oppose 
the King of England. So John and the French King went to war 
about Arthur. 

He was a handsome boy, at that time only twelve years old. He 
was not born when his father, Geoffrey, had his brains trampled 
out at the tournament ; and, besides the misfortune of never hav- 
ing known a father's guidance and protection, he had the additional 
misfortune to have a foolish mother (Constance by name), lately 
married to her third husband. She took Arthur, upon John's acces- 
sion, to the French King, who pretended to be very much his friend, 
and who made him a Knight, and promised him his daughter in mar- 
riage ; but, who cared so little about him in reality, that finding it 
his interest to make peace with King John for a time, he did so 
without the least consideration for the poor little Prince, and heart- 
lessly sacrificed all his interests. 

Young Arthur, for two years afterwards, lived quietly ; and in 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 413 

the course of that time his mother died. But, the French King 
then finding it his interest to quarrel with King John again, again 
made Arthur his pretence, and invited the orphan boy to court. 
" You know your rights. Prince," said the French King, " and you 
would like to be a King. Is it not so?" "Truly," said Prince 
Arthur, " I should greatly like to be a King ! " " Then," said 
Philip, " you shall have two hundred gentlemen who are Knights of 
mine, and with them you shall go to win back the provinces belong- 
ing to you, of which your uncle, the usurping King of England, 
has taken possession. I myself, meanwhile, will head a force against 
him in Normandy." Poor Arthur was so flattered and so grateful 
that he signed a treaty with the crafty French King, agreeing to 
consider him his superior Lord, and that the French King should 
keep for himself whatever he could take from King John. 

Now, King John was so bad in all ways, and King Philip was 
so perfidious, that Arthur, between the two, might as well have 
been a lamb between a fox and a wolf. But, being so young, he 
was ardent and flushed with hope ; and, when the people of Brit- 
tany (which was his inheritance) sent him five hundred more knights 
and five thousand foot soldiers, he believed his fortune was made. 
The people of Brittany had been fond of him from his birth, and 
had requested that he might be called Arthur, in remembrance of 
that dimly-famous English Arthur, of whom I told you early in 
this book, whom they believed to have been the brave friend and 
companion of an old King of their own. They had tales among 
them about a prophet called Merlin (of the same old time), who 
had foretold that their own King should be restored to them after 
hundreds of years ; and they believed that the prophecy would be 
fulfilled in Arthur ; that the time would come when he would rule 
them with a crown of Brittany upon his head ; and when neither 
King of France nor King of England would have any power over 
them. When Arthur found himself riding in a glittering suit of 
armour on a richly caparisoned horse, at the head of his train of 
knights and soldiers, he began to believe this too, and to consider 
old Merlin a very superior prophet. 

He did not know — how could he, being so innocent and inex- 
perienced ? — that his little army was a mere nothing against the 
power of the King of England. The French King knew it ; but 
the poor boy's fate was little to him, so that the King of England 
was worried and distressed. Therefore, King Philip went his way 
into Normandy, and Prince Arthur went his way towards Mirebeau, 
a French town near Poictiers, both very well pleased. 

Prince Arthur went to attack the town of Mirebeau, because his 
grandmother Eleanor, who has so often made her appearance in this 



414 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

history (and who had always been his mother's enemy), was living 
there, and because his Knights said, " Prince, if you can take her 
prisoner, you will be able to bring the King your uncle to terms ! " 
But she was not to be easily taken. She was old enough by this 
time — eighty — but she was as full of stratagem as she was full 
of years and wickedness. Receiving intelligence of young Arthur's 
approach, she shut herself up in a high tower, and encouraged her 
soldiers to defend it like men. Prince Arthur with his little army 
besieged the high tower. King John, hearing how matters stood, 
came up to the rescue, with his army. So here was a strange family- 
party ! The boy-Prince besieging his grandmother, and his uncle 
besieging him ! 

This position of affairs did not last long. One summer night 
King John, by treachery, got his men into the town, surprised 
Prince Ai'thur's force, took two hundred of his knights, and seized 
the Prince himself in his bed. The Knights were put in heavy 
irons, and driven away in open carts drawn by bullocks, to various 
dungeons where they were most inhumanly treated, and where some 
of them were starved to death. Prince Arthur was sent to the 
castle of Falaise. 

One day, while he was in prison at that castle, mournfully think- 
ing it strange that one so young should be in so much trouble, and 
looking out of the small window in the deep dark wall, at the sum- 
mer sky and the birds, the door was softly opened, and he saw his 
uncle the King standing in the shadow of the archway, looking very 
grim. 

"Arthur," said the King, with his wicked eyes more on the 
stone floor than on his nephew, "will you not trust to the gentle- 
ness, the friendship, and the truthfulness of your loving uncle 1 " 

"I will tell my loving uncle that," replied the boy, "when he 
does me right. Let him restore to me my kingdom of England, 
and then come to me and ask the question." 

The King looked at him and went out. " Keep that boy close 
prisoner," said he to the warden of the castle. 

Then, the King took secret counsel with the worst of his nobles 
how the Prince was to be got rid of. Some said, "Put out his 
eyes and keep him in prison, as Robert of Normandy was kept." 
Others said, " Have him stabbed." Others, " Have him hanged." 
Others, " Have him poisoned." 

King John, feeling that in any case, whatever was done after- 
wards, it would be a satisfaction to his mind to have those hand- 
some eyes burnt out that had looked at him so proudly while his 
own royal eyes were blinking at the stone floor, sent certain ruf- 
fians to Falaise to blind the boy with red-hot irons. But Arthur 




ARTHUR AND HUBERT. 



416 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

so pathetically entreated them, and shed such piteous tears, and so 
appealed to Hubert de Bourg (or Burgh), the warden of the 
castle, who had a love for him, and was an honourable tender man, 
that Hubert could not bear it. To his eternal honour he prevented 
the torture from being performed, and, at his own risk, sent the 
savages away. 

The chafed and disappointed King bethought himself of the stab- 
bing suggestion next, and, with his shuffling manner and his cruel 
face, proposed it to one William de Bray. " I am a gentleman and 
not an executioner," said William de Bray, and left the presence 
with disdain. 

But it was not difficult for a King to hire a murderer in those 
days. King John found one for his money, and sent him down to 
the castle of Falaise. " On what errand dost thou come 1 " said 
Hubert to this fellow. "To despatch young Arthur," he returned. 
"Go back to him who sent thee," answered Hubert, "and say that 
I will do it ! " 

King John very well knowing that Hubert would never do it, 
but that he courageously sent this reply to save the Prince or gain 
time, despatched messengers to convey the young prisoner to the 
castle of Rouen. 

Arthur was soon forced from the good Hubert — of whom he 
had never stood in greater need than then — carried away by night, 
and lodged in his new prison : where, through his grated window, 
he could hear the deep waters of the river Seine, rippling against 
the stone wall below. 

One dark night, as he lay sleeping, dreaming perhaps of rescue 
by those unfortunate gentlemen who were obscurely suffering and 
dying in his cause, he was roused, and bidden by his jailer to come 
down the staircase to the foot of the tower. He hurriedly dressed 
himself and obeyed. When they came to the bottom of the wind- 
ing stairs, and the night air from the river blew upon their faces, 
the jailer trod upon his torch and put it out. Then, Arthur, in 
the darkness, was hurriedly drawn into a solitary boat. And in 
that boat, he found his uncle and one other man. 

He knelt to them, and prayed them not to murder him. Deaf 
to his entreaties, they stabbed him and sunk his body in the river 
with heavy stones. When the spring-morning broke, the tower- 
door was closed, the boat was gone, the river sparkled on its way, 
and never more was any trace of the poor boy beheld by mortal 
eyes. 

The news of this atrocious murder being spread in England, 
awakened a hatred of the King (already odious for his many vices, 
and for his having stolen away and married a noble lady while his 



A CHILD'S HISTOEY OF ENGLAND. 417 

own wife was living) that never slept again through his whole 
reign. In Brittany, the indignation was intense. Arthur's own 
sister Eleanor was in the power of John and shut up in a convent 
at Bristol, but his half-sister Alice was in Brittany. The people 
chose her, and the murdered prince's father-in-law, the last husband 
of Constance, to represent them ; and carried their fiery complaints 
to King Philip. King Philip summoned King John (as the holder 
of territory in France) to come before him and defend himself 
King John refusing to appear, King Philip declared him false, 
perjured, and guilty ; and again made war. In a little time, by 
conquering the greater part of his French territory, King Philip 
deprived him of one-third of his dominions. And, through all the 
fighting that took place. King John was always found, either to be 
eating and drinking, like a gluttonous fool, when the danger was 
at a distance, or to be running away, like a beaten cur, when it 
was near. 

You might suppose that when he was losing his dominions at 
this rate, and when his own nobles cared so little for him or his 
cause that they plainly refused to follow his banner out of England, 
he had enemies enough. But he made another enemy of the Pope, 
which he did in this way. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury dying, and the junior monks 
of that place wishing to get the start of the senior monks in the 
appointment of his successor, met together at midnight, secretly 
elected a certain Reginald, and sent him off to Rome to get the 
Pope's approval. The senior monks and the King soon finding this 
out, and being very angry about it, the junior monks gave way, 
and all the monks together elected the Bishop of Norwich, who 
was the King's favourite. The Pope, hearing the whole story, de- 
clared that neither election would do for him, and that he elected 
Stephen Langton. The monks submitting to the Pope, the 
King turned them all out bodily, and banished them as traitors. 
The Pope sent three bishops to the King, to threaten him with an 
Interdict. The King told the bishops that if any Interdict were 
laid upon his kingdom, he would tear out the eyes and cut off the 
noses of all the monks he could lay hold of, and send them over 
to Rome in that undecorated state as a present for their master. 
The bishops, nevertheless, soon published the Interdict, and fled. 

After it had lasted a year, the Pope proceeded to his next step ; 
which was Excommunication. King John was declared excommu- 
nicated, with all the usual ceremonies. The King was so incensed 
at this, and was made so desperate by the disaffection of his Barons 
and the hatred of his people, that it is said he even privately sent 
ambassadors to the Turks in Spain, offering to renounce his religion 
2e 



418 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

and hold his kingdom of them if they would help him. It is re- 
lated that the ambassadors were admitted to the presence of the 
Turkish Emir through long lines of Moorish guards, and that they 
found the Emir with his eyes seriously fixed on the pages of a large 
bbok, from which he never once looked up. That they gave him a 
letter from the King containing his proposals, and were gravely dis- 
missed. That presently the Emir sent for one of them, and con- 
jured him, by his faith in his religion, to say what kind of man the 
King of England truly was ? That the ambassador, thus pressed, 
replied that the King of England was a false tyrant, against whom 
his own subjects would soon rise. And that this was quite enough 
for the Emir. 

Money being, in his position, the next best thing to men. King 
John spared no means of getting it. He set on foot another oppres- 
sing and torturing of the unhappy Jews (which was quite in his 
way), and invented a new punishment for one wealthy Jew of Bris- 
tol. Until such time as that Jew should produce a certain large 
sum of money, the King sentenced him to be imprisoned, and, every 
day, to have one tooth violently wrenched out of his head — begin- 
ning with the double teeth. For seven days, the oppressed man 
bore the daily pain and lost the daily tooth ; but, on the eighth, he 
paid the money. With the treasure raised in such ways, the King 
made an expedition into Ireland, where some English nobles had 
revolted. It was one of the very few places from which he did not 
run away; because no resistance was shown. He made another 
expedition into Wales — whence he did run away in the end : but 
not before he had got from the Welsh people, as hostages, twenty- 
seven young men of the best families ; every one of whom he caused 
to be slain in the following year. 

To Interdict and Excommunication, the Pope now added his 
last sentence ; Deposition. He proclaimed John no longer King, 
absolved all his subjects from their allegiance, and sent Stephen 
Langton and others to the King of France to tell him that, if he 
would invade England, he should be forgiven all his sins — at least, 
should be forgiven them by the Pope, if that would do. 

As there was nothing that King Philip desired more than to 
invade England, he collected a great army at Rouen, and a fleet of 
seventeen hundred ships to bring them over. But the English 
people, however bitterly they hated the King, were not a people to 
suffer invasion quietly. They flocked to Dover, where the English 
standard was, in such great numbers to enrol themselves as defenders 
of their native land, that there were not provisions for them, and the 
King could only select and retain sixty thousand. But, at this 
crisis, the Pope, who had his own reasons for objecting to either 



A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 419 

King John or King Philip being too powerful, interfered. He en- 
trusted a legate, whose name was Pandolf, with the easy task of 
frightening King John. He sent him to the English Camp, from 
France, to terrify him with exaggerations of King Philip's power, 
and his own weakness in the discontent of the English Barons 
and people. Pandolf discharged his commission so well, that King 
John, in a wretched panic, consented to acknowledge Stephen Lang- 
ton ; to resign his kingdom " to God, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul " 
— which meant the Pope ; and to hold it, ever afterwards, by the 
Pope's leave, on payment of an annual sum of money. To this 
shameful contract he publicly bound himself in the church of the 
Knights Templars at Dover : where he laid at the legate's feet a 
part of the tribute, which the legate haughtily trampled upon. 
But they do say, that this was merely a genteel flourish, and that 
he was afterwards seen to pick it up and pocket it. 

There was an unfortunate prophet, of the name of Peter, who 
had greatly increased King John's terrors by predicting that he 
would be unknighted (which the King supposed to signify that he 
would die) before the Feast of the Ascension should be past. That 
was the day after this humiliation. When the next morning 
came, and the King, who had been trembling all night, found him- 
self alive and safe, he ordered the prophet — and his son too — to 
be dragged through the streets at the tails of horses, and then 
hanged, for having frightened him. 

As King John had now submitted, the Pope, to King Philip's 
great astonishment, took him under his protection, and informed 
King Philip that he found he could not give him leave to invade 
England. The angry Philip resolved to do it without his leave ; 
but he gained nothing and lost much ; for, the English, commanded 
by the Earl of Salisbury, went over, in five hundred ships, to the 
French coast, before the French fleet had sailed away from it, and 
utterly defeated the whole. 

The Pope then took off his three sentences, one after another, and 
empowered Stephen Langton publicly to receive King John into 
the favour of the Church again, and to ask him to dinner. The 
King, who hated Langton with all his might and main — and with 
reason too, for he was a great and a good man, with whom such a 
King could have no sympathy — pretended to cry and to be very 
grateful. There wa,s a little difficulty about settling how much the 
King should pay as a recompense to the clergy for the losses he had 
caused them ; but, the end of it was, that the superior clergy got a 
good deal, and the inferior clergy got little or nothing — which has 
also happened since King John's time, I believe. 

When all these matters were arranged, the King in his triumph 



420 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

became more fierce, and false, and insolent to all around him than 
he had ever been. An alliance of sovereigns against King Philip, 
gave him an opportunity of landing an army in France ; with which 
he even took a town ! But, on the French King's gaining a great 
victory, he ran away, of course, and made a truce for five years. 

And now the time approached when he was to be still further 
humbled, and made to feel, if he could feel anything, what a 
wretched creature he was. Of all men in the world, Stephen Lang- 
ton seemed raised up by Heaven to oppose and subdue him. 
When he ruthlessly burnt and destroyed the property of his own 
subjects, because their Lords, the Barons, would not serve him 
abroad, Stephen Langton fearlessly reproved and threatened him. 
When he swore to restore the laws of King Edward, or the laws of 
King Henry the First, Stephen Langton knew his falsehood, and pur- 
sued him through all his evasions. When the Barons met at the ab- 
bey of Saint Edmund's-Bury, to consider their wrongs and the King's 
oppressions, Stephen Langton roused them by his fervid words to 
demand a solemn charter of rights and liberties from their perjured 
master, and to swear, one by one, on the High Altar, that they 
would have it, or would wage war against him to the death. When 
the King hid himself in London from the Barons, and was at last 
obliged to receive them, they told him roundly they would not be- 
lieve him unless Stephen Langton became a surety that he would 
keep his word. When he took the Cross to invest himself with 
some interest, and belong to something that was received with favour, 
Stephen Langton was still immovable. When he appealed to the 
Pope, and the Pope wrote to Stephen Langton in behalf of his new 
favourite, Stephen Langton was deaf, even to the Pope himself, and 
saw before him nothing but the welfare of England and the crimes 
of the English King. 

At Easter-time, the Barons assembled at Stamford, in Lincoln- 
shire, in proud array, and, marching near to Oxford where the King 
was, delivered into the hands of Stephen Langton and two others, 
a list of grievances. "And these," they said, "he must redress, or 
we will do it for ourselves ! " When Stephen Langton told the 
King as much, and read the list to him, he went half mad with 
rage. But that did him no more good than his afterwards trying 
to pacify the Barons with lies. They called themselves and their 
followers, " The army of God and the Holy Church." Marching 
through the country, with the people thronging to them every- 
where (except at Northampton, where they failed in an attack 
upon the castle), they at last triumphantly set up their banner in 
London itself, whither the whole land, tired of the tyrant, seemed 
to flock to join them. Seven knights alone, of all the knights in 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 421 

England, remained T\-ith the King ; who, reduced to this strait, at 
last sent the Earl of Pembroke to the Barons to say that he ap- 
proved of everything, and would meet them to sign their charter 
when they would. " Then," said the Barons, "let the day be the 
fifteenth of June, and the place, Runny-Mead." 

On Monday, the fifteenth of June, one thousand two hundred 
and fourteen, the King came from Windsor Castle, and the Barons 
came from the town of Staines, and they met on Runny-Mead, 
which is still a pleasant meadow by the Thames, where rushes 
grow in the clear water of the winding river, and its banks are 
green with grass and trees. On the side of the Barons, came the 
General of their army, Robert Fitz- Walter, and a great con- 
course of the nobility of England. With the King, came, in aU, 
some four-and-twenty persons of any note, most of whom despised 
him, and were merely his advisers in form. On that great day, 
and in that great company, the King signed Magna Charta — 
the great charter of England — by which he pledged himself to 
maintain the Church in its rights ; to relieve the Barons of oppres- 
sive obligations as vassals of the Crown — of which the Barons, in 
their turn, pledged themselves to relieve their vassals, the people ; 
to respect the liberties of London and all other cities and boroughs ; 
to protect foreign merchants who came to England ; to imprison no 
man without a fair trial ; and to sell, delay, or deny justice to 
none. As the Barons knew his falsehood well, they further re- 
quired, as their securities, that he should send out of his kingdom 
all his foreign troops ; that for two months they should hold pos- 
session of the city of London, and Stephen Langton of the Tower ; 
and that five-and-twenty of their body, chosen by themselves, 
should be a lawful committee to watch the keeping of the charter, 
and to make war upon him if he broke it. 

All this he was obliged to yield. He signed the charter with a 
smile, and, if he could have looked agreeable, would have done so, 
as he departed from the splendid assembly. When he got home 
to Windsor Castle, he was quite a madman in his helpless fury. 
And he broke the charter immediately afterwards. 

He sent abroad for foreign soldiers, and sent to the Pope for 
help, and plotted to. take London by surprise, while the Barons 
should be holding a great tournament at Stamford, which they had 
agreed to hold there as a celebration of the charter. The Barons, 
however, found him out and put it ofi". Then, when the Barons de- 
sired to see him and tax him with his treachery, he made numbers 
of appointments with them, and kept none, and shifted from place to 
place, and was constantly sneaking and skulking about. At last he 
appeared at Dover, to join his foreign soldiers, of whom numbers 



422 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

came into his pay ; and with them he besieged and took Rochester 
Castle, which was occupied by knights and soldiers of the Barons. 
He would have hanged them every one ; but the leader of the for- 
eign soldiers, fearful of what the English people might afterwards 
do to him, interfered to save the knights ; therefore the King was 
fain to satisfy his vengeance with the death of all the common men. 
Then, he sent the Earl of Salisbury, with one portion of his army, 
to ravage the eastern part of his own dominions, while he carried 
fire and slaughter into the northern part ; torturing, plundering, 
killing, and inflicting every possible cruelty upon the people ; and, 
every morning, setting a worthy example to his men by setting 
fire, with his own monster-hands, to the house where he had slept 
last night. Nor was this all ; for the Pope, coming to the aid of 
his precious friend, laid the kingdom under an Interdict again, be- 
cause the people took part with the Barons. It did not much 
matter, for the people had grown so used to it now, that they had 
begun to think nothing about it. It occurred to them — perhaps 
to Stephen Langton too — that they could keep their churches 
open, and ring their bells, without the Pope's permission as well as 
with it. So, they tried the experiment — and found that it suc- 
ceeded perfectly. 

It being now impossible to bear the country, as a wilderness of 
cruelty, or longer to hold any terms with such a forsworn outlaw 
of a King, the Barons sent to Louis, son of the French monarch, 
to offer him the English crown. Caring as little for the Pope's 
excommunication of him if he accepted the offer, as it is possible 
his father may have cared for the Pope's forgiveness of his sins, he 
landed at Sandwich (King John immediately running away from 
Dover, where he happened to be), and went on to London. The 
Scottish King, with whom many of the Northern English Lords 
had taken refuge ; numbers of the foreign soldiers, numbers of the 
Barons, and numbers of the people went over to him every day ; — 
King John, the while, continually running away in all directions. 
The career of Louis was checked, however, by the suspicions of the 
Barons, founded on the dying declaration of a French Lord, that 
when the kingdom was conquered he was sworn to banish them as 
traitors, and to give their estates to some of his own Nobles. 
Rather than suffer this, some of the Barons hesitated : others even 
went over to King John. 

It seemed to be the turning-point of King John's fortunes, for, 
in his savage and murderous course, he had now taken some towns 
and met with some successes. But, happily for England and hu- 
manity, his death was near. Crossing a dangerous quicksand, called 
the Wash, not very far from Wisbeach, the tide came up and nearly 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 423 

drowned his army. He and his soldiers escaped ; but, looking back 
from the shore when he was safe, he saw the roaring water sweep 
down in a torrent, overturn the waggons, horses, and men, that carried 
his treasure, and engulf them in a raging whirlpool from which noth- 
ing could be delivered. 

Cursing, and swearing, and gnawing his fingers, he went on to 
Swinestead Abbey, where the monks set before him quantities of 
pears, and peaches, and new cider — some say poison too, but there 
is very little reason to suppose so — of which he ate and drank in 
an immoderate and beastly way. All night he lay ill of a burning 
fever, and haunted with horrible fears. Next day, they put him in 
a horse-litter, and carried him to Sleaford Castle, where he passed 
another night of pain and horror. Next day, they carried him, with 
greater difficulty than on the day before, to the castle of Newark 
upon Trent ; and there, on the eighteenth of October, in the forty- 
ninth year of his age, and the seventeenth of his vile reign, was an 
end of this miserable brute. 



CHAPTER XV. 

ENGLAND UNDER HENEY THE THIRD, CALLED OF "WINCHESTER. 

If any of the English Barons remembered the murdered Arthur's 
sister, Eleanor the fair maid of Brittany, shut up in her convent at 
Bristol, none among them spoke of her now, or maintained her right 
to the Crown. The dead Usurper's eldest boy, Henry by name, 
was taken by the Earl of Pembroke, the Marshal of England, to 
the city of Gloucester, and there crowned in great haste when he 
was only ten years old. As the Crown itself had been lost with the 
King's treasure, in the raging water, and, as there was no time to 
make another, they put a circle of plain gold upon his head instead. 
"We have been the enemies of this child's father," said Lord Pem- 
broke, a good and true gentleman, to the few Lords who were pres- 
ent, " and he merited our ill-will ; but the child himself is innocent, 
and his youth demands our friendship and protection." Those Lords 
felt tenderly towards the little boy, remembering their own young 
children ; and they bowed their heads, and said, " Long live King 
Henry the Third ! " 

Next, a great council met at Bristol, revised Magna Charta, and 
made Lord Pembroke Regent or Protector of England, as the King 
was too young to reign alone. The next thing to be done, was to 
get rid of Prince Louis of France, and to win over those English 
Barons who were still ranged under his banner. He was strong in 



424 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

many parts of England, and in London itself; and he held, among 
other places, a certain Castle called the Castle of Mount Sorel, in 
Leicestershire. To this fortress, after some skirmishing and truce- 
making. Lord Pembroke laid siege. Louis despatched an army of 
six hundred knights and twenty thousand soldiers to relieve it. 
Lord Pembroke, who was not strong enough for such a force, retired 
with all his men. The army of the French Prince, which had 
marched there with fire and plunder, marched away with fire and 
plunder, and came, in a boastful swaggering manner, to Lincoln. 
The town submitted ; but the Castle in the town, held by a brave 
widow lady, named Nichola de Camville (whose property it was), 
made such a sturdy resistance, that the French Count in command 
of the army of the French Prince found it necessary to besiege this 
Castle. While he was thus engaged, word was brought to him 
that Lord Pembroke, with four hundred knights, two hundred and 
fifty men with cross-bows, and a stout force both of horse and foot, 
was marching towards him. "What care I?" said the French 
Count. " The Englishman is not so mad as to attack me and my 
great army in a walled town ! " But the Englishman did it for all 
that, and did it — not so madly but so wisely, that he decoyed the 
great army into the narrow, ill-paved lanes and byeways of Lincoln, 
where its horse-soldiers could not ride in any strong body; and 
there he made such havoc with them, that the whole force surren- 
dered themselves prisoners, except the Count; who said that he 
would never yield to any English traitor alive, and accordingly got 
killed. The end of this victory, which the English called, for a 
joke, the Fair of Lincoln, was the usual one in those times — the 
common men were slain without any mercy, and the knights and 
gentlemen paid ransom and went home. 

The wife of Louis, the fair Blanche of Castile, dutifully 
equipped a fleet of eighty good ships, and sent it over from 
France to her husband's aid. An English fleet of forty ships, 
some good and some bad, gallantly met them near the mouth of 
the Thames, and took or sunk sixty-five in one fight. This great 
loss put an end to the French Prince's hopes. A treaty was made 
at Lambeth, in virtue of which the English Barons who had re- 
mained attached to his cause returned to their allegiance, and it 
was engaged on both sides that the Prince and all his troops should 
retire peacefully to France. It was time to go ; for war had made 
him so poor that he was obliged to borrow money from the citizens 
of London to pay his expenses home. 

Lord Pembroke afterwards applied himself to governing the 
country justly, and to healing the quarrels and disturbances that 
had arisen among men in the days of the bad King John. He 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 425 

caused Magna Charta to be still more improved, and so amended 
the Forest Laws that a Peasant was no longer put to death for 
killing a stag in a Royal Forest, but was only imprisoned. It 
would have been well for England if it could have had so good 
a Protector many years longer, but that was not to be. Within 
three years after the young King's Coronation, Lord Pembroke 
died ; and you may see his tomb, at this day, in the old Temple 
Church in London, 

The Protectorship was now divided. Peter de Roches, whom 
King John had made Bishop of Winchester, was entrusted with 
the care of the person of the young sovereign ; and the exercise 
of the Royal authority was confided to Earl Hubert de Burgh. 
These two personages had from the first no liking for each other, 
and soon became enemies. When the young King was declared 
of age, Peter de Roches, finding that Hubert increased in power 
and favour, retired discontentedly, and went abroad. For nearly 
ten years afterwards Hubert had full sway alone. 

But ten years is a long time to hold the favour of a King. 
This King, too, as he grew up, showed a strong resemblance to 
his father, in feebleness, inconsistency, and irresolution. The best 
that can be said of him is that he was not cruel. De Roches 
coming home again, after ten years, and being a novelty, the King 
began to favour him and to look coldly on Hubert. Wanting 
money besides, and having made Hubert rich, he began to dislike 
Hubert. At last he was made to believe, or pretended to believe, 
that Hubert had misappropriated some of the Royal treasure ; and 
ordered him to furnish an account of all he had done in his admin- 
istration. Besides which, the foolish charge was brought against 
Hubert that he had made himself the King's favourite by magic. 
Hubert very well knowing that he could never defend himself 
against such nonsense, and that his old enemy must be determined 
on his ruin, instead of answering the charges fled to Merton Abbey. 
Then the King, in a violent passion, sent for the Mayor of London, 
and said to the Mayor, " Take twenty thousand citizens, and drag 
me Hubert de Burgh out of that abbey, and bring him here." 
The Mayor posted off to do it, but the Archbishop of Dublin (who 
was a friend of Hubert's) warning the King that an abbey was a 
sacred place, and that if he committed any violence there, he must 
answer for it to the Church, the King changed his mind and called 
the Mayor back, and declared that Hubert should have four months 
to prepare his defence, and should be safe and free during that 
time. 

Hubert, who relied upon the King's word, though I think he 
was old enough to have known better, came out of Merton Abbey 



426 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

upon these conditions, and journeyed away to see his wife : a Scot- 
tish Princess who was then at Saint Edmund's-Bury. 

Almost as soon as he had departed from the Sanctuary, his 
enemies persuaded the weak King to send out one Sir Godfrey 
DE Crancumb, who commanded three hundred vagabonds called 
the Black Band, with orders to seize him. They came up with 
him at a little town in Essex, called Brentwood, when he was in 
bed. He leaped out of bed, got out of the house, fled to the 
church, ran up to the altar, and laid his hand upon the cross. 
Sir Godfrey and the Black Band, caring neither for church, altar, 
nor cross, dragged him forth to the church door, with their drawn 
swords flashing round his head, and sent for a Smith to rivet a set 
of chains upon him. When the Smith (I wish I knew his name !) 
was brought, all dark and swarthy with the smoke of his forge, 
and panting with the speed he had made ; and the Black Band, 
falling aside to show him the Prisoner, cried with a loud uproar, 
"Make the fetters heavy ! make them strong ! " the Smith dropped 
upon his knee — but not to the Black Band — and said, "This is 
the brave Earl Hubert de Burgh, who fought at Dover Castle, and 
destroyed the French fleet, and has done his country much good 
service. You may kill me, if you like, but I will never make 
a chain for Earl Hubert de Burgh ! " 

The Black Band never blushed, or they might have blushed at this. 
They knocked the Smith about from one to another, and swore at 
him, and tied the Earl on horseback, undressed as he was, and carried 
him off to the Tower of London. The Bishops, however, were so 
indignant at the violation of the Sanctuary of the Church, that 
the frightened King soon ordered the Black Band to take him back 
again ; at the same time commanding the Sheriff of Essex to pre- 
vent his escaping out of Brentwood Church. Well ! the Sheriff 
dug a deep trench all round the church, and erected a high fence, 
and watched the church night and day ; the Black Band and their 
Captain watched it too, like three hundred and one black wolves. 
For thirty-nine days, Hubert de Burgh remained within. At 
length, upon the fortieth day, cold and hunger were too much for 
him, and he gave himself up to the Black Band, who carried him 
off, for the second time, to the Tower. When his trial came on, 
he refused to plead ; but at last it was arranged that he should 
give up all the royal lands which had been bestowed upon him, 
and should be kept at the Castle of Devizes, in what was called 
"free prison," in charge of four knights appointed by four lords. 
There, he remained almost a year, until, learning that a follower 
of his old enemy the Bishop was made Keeper of the Castle, and 
fearing that lie might be killed by treachery, he climbed the ram- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 427 

parts one dark night, dropped from the top of the high Castle wall 
into the moat, and coming safely to the ground, took refuge in 
another church. From this place he was delivered by a party of 
horse despatched to his help by some nobles, who were by this 
time in revolt against the King, and assembled in Wales. He was 
finally pardoned and restored to his estates, but he lived privately, 
and never more aspired to a high post in the realm, or to a high 
place in the King's favour. And thus end — more happily than 
the stories of many favourites of Kings — the adventures of Earl 
Hubert de Burgh. 

The nobles, who had risen in revolt, were stirred up to rebellion 
by the overbearing conduct of the Bishop of Winchester, who, find- 
ing that the King secretly hated the Great Charter which had been 
forced from his father, did his utmost to confirm him in that dis- 
like, and in the preference he showed to foreigners over the English. 
Of this, and of his even publicly declaring that the Barons of Eng- 
land were inferior to those of France, the English Lords complained 
with such bitterness, that the King, finding them well supported 
by the clergy, became frightened for his throne, and sent away the 
Bishop and all his foreign associates. On his marriage, however, 
with Eleanor, a French lady, the daughter of the Count of Pro- 
vence, he openly favoured the foreigners again ; and so many of his 
wife's relations came over, and made such an immense family-party 
at court, and got so many good things, and pocketed so much 
money, and were so high with the English whose money they 
pocketed, that the bolder English Barons murmured openly about 
a clause there was in the Great Charter, which provided for the 
banishment of unreasonable favourites. But, the foreigners only 
laughed disdainfully, and said, " What are your English laws to 
us?" 

King Philip of France had died, and had been succeeded by 
Prince Louis, who had also died after a short reign of three years, 
and had been succeeded by his son of the same name — so moderate 
and just a man that he was not the least in the world like a King, 
as Kings went. Isabella, King Henry's mother, wished very 
much (for a certain spite she had) that England should make war 
against this King ; and, as King Henry was a mere puppet in any- 
body's hands who knew how to manage his feebleness, she easily 
carried her point with him. But, the Parliament were determined 
to give him no money for such a war. So, to defy the Parliament, 
he packed up thirty large casks of silver — I don't know how he 
got so much ; I dare say he screwed it out of the miserable Jews 
— and put them aboard ship, and went away himself to carry war 
into France : accompanied by his mother and his brother Richard, 



428 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Earl of Cornwall, who was rich and clever. But he only got well 
beaten, and came home. 

The good humour of the Parliament was not restored by this. 
They reproached the King with wasting the public money to make 
greedy foreigners rich, and were so stem with him, and so deter- 
mined not to let him have more of it to waste if they could help 
it, that he was at his wit's end for some, and tried so shamelessly 
to get all he could from his subjects, by excuses or by force, that 
the people used to say the King was the sturdiest beggar in Eng- 
land. He took the Cross, thinking to get some money by that 
means ; but, as it was very well known that he never meant to go on 
a crusade, he got none. In all this contention, the Londoners were 
particularly keen against the King, and the King hated them 
warmly in return. Hating or loving, however, made no difference ; 
he continued in the same condition for nine or ten years, when at 
last the Barons said that if he would solemnly confirm their liberties 
afresh, the Parliament would vote him a large sum. 

As he readily consented, there was a great meeting held in West- 
minster Hall, one pleasant day in May, when all the clergy, dressed 
in their robes and holding every one of them a burning candle in 
his hand, stood up (the Barons being also there) while the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury read the sentence of excommunication against 
any man, and all men, who should henceforth, in any way, infringe 
the Great Charter of the Kingdom. When he had done, they all 
put out their burning candles with a curse upon the soul of any 
one, and every one, who should merit that sentence. The King 
concluded with an oath to keep the Charter, " As I am a man, as 
I am a Christian, as I am a Knight, as I am a King ! " 

It was easy to make oaths, and easy to break them ; and the 
King did both, as his father had done before him. He took to 
his old courses again when he was supplied with money, and soon 
cured of their weakness the few who had ever really trusted him. 
When his money was gone, and he was once more borrowing and 
begging everywhere with a meanness worthy of his nature, he got 
into a difficulty with the Pope respecting the Crown of Sicily, 
which the Pope said he had a right to give away, and which he 
off'ered to King Henry for his second son. Prince Edmund. But, 
if you or I give away what we have not got, and w:hat belongs to 
somebody else, it is likely that the person to whom we give it, will 
have some trouble in taking it. It was exactly so in this case. It was 
necessary to conquer the Sicilian Crown before it could be put upon 
young Edmund's head. It could not be conquered without money. 
The Pope ordered the clergy to raise money. The clergy, however, 
were not so obedient to him as usual ; they had been disputing 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 429 

with him for some time about his unjust preference of Italian 
Priests in England ; and they had begun to doubt whether the 
King's chaplain, whom he allowed to be paid for preaching in 
seven hundred churches, could possibly be, even by the Pope's 
favour, in seven hundred places at once. " The Pope and the 
King together," said the Bishop of London, "may take the mitre 
off my head ; but, if they do, they wiU find that I shall put on a 
soldier's helmet. I pay nothing." The Bishop of Worcester was 
as bold as the Bishop of London, and would pay nothing either. 
Such sums as the more timid or more helpless of the clergy did 
raise were squandered away, without doing any good to the King, 
or bringing the Sicilian Crown an inch nearer to Prince Edmund's 
head. The end of the business was, that the Pope gave the Crown 
to the brother of the King of France (who conquered it for himself), 
and sent the King of England in a bill of one hundred thousand 
pounds for the expenses of not having won it. 

The King was now so much distressed that we might almost 
pity him, if it were possible to pity a King so shabby and ridicu- 
lous. His clever brother, Richard, had bought the title of King of 
the Romans from the German people, and was no longer near him, 
to help him with advice. The clergy, resisting the very Pope, were 
in alliance with the Barons. The Barons were headed by Simon de 
MoxTFORT, Earl of Leicester, married to King Henry's sister, and, 
though a foreigner himself, the most popular man in England against 
the foreign favourites. When the King next met his Parliament, 
the Barons, led by this Earl, came before him, armed from head to 
foot, and cased in armour. When the Parliament again assembled, 
in a month's time, at Oxford, this Earl was at their head, and the 
King was obliged to consent, on oath, to what was called a Com- 
mittee of Government : consisting of twenty-four members : twelve 
chosen by the Barons, and twelve chosen by himself. 

But, at a good time for him, his brother Richard came back. 
Richard's first act (the Barons would not admit him into England 
on other terms) was to swear to be faithful to the Committee of 
Government — which he immediately began to oppose with all his 
might. Then, the Barons began to quarrel among themselves ; 
especially the proud Earl of Gloucester with the Earl of Leicester, 
who went abroad in disgust. Then, the people began to be dissat- 
isfied with the Barons, because they did not do enough for them. 
The King's chances seemed so good again at length, that he took 
heart enough — or caught it from his brother — to tell the Com- 
mittee of Government that he abolished them — as to his oath, 
never mind that, the Pope said ! — and to seize all the money in 
the Mint, and to shut himself up in the Tower of London, Here 



430 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

he was joined by his eldest son, Prince Edward ; and, from the 
Tower, he made public a letter of the Pope's to the world in gen- 
eral, informing all men that he had been an excellent and just King 
for five-and-forty years. 

As everybody knew he had been nothing of the sort, nobody cared 
much for this document. It so chanced that the proud Earl of 
Gloucester dying, was succeeded by his son ; and that his son, instead 
of being the enemy of the Earl of Leicester, was (for the time) his 
friend. It fell out, therefore, that these two Earls joined their forces, 
took several of the Royal Castles in the country, and advanced as 
hard as they could on London. The London people, always opposed 
to the King, declared for them with great joy. The King himself 
remained shut up, not at all gloriously, in the Tower. Prince 
Edward made the best of his way to Windsor Castle. His mother, 
the Queen, attempted to follow him by water ; but, the people see- 
ing her barge rowing up the river, and hating her with all their 
hearts, ran to London Bridge, got together a quantity of stones and 
mud, and pelted the barge as it came through, crying furiously, 
"Drown the Witch ! Drown her ! " They were so near doing it, 
that the Mayor took the old lady under his protection, and shut her 
up in Saint Paul's until the danger was past. 

It would require a great deal of writing on my part, and a great 
deal of reading on yours, to follow the King through his disputes 
with the Barons, and to follow the Barons through their disputes 
with one another — so I will make short work of it for both of us, 
and only relate the chief events that arose out of these quarrels. The 
good King of France was asked to decide between them. He gave 
it as his opinion that the King must maintain the Great Charter, 
and that the Barons must give up the Committee of Government, and 
all the rest that had been done by the Parliament at Oxford : which 
the Royalists, or King's party, scornfully called the Mad Parlia- 
ment. The Barons declared that these were not fair terms, and 
they would not accept them. Then they caused the great bell of 
Saint Paul's to be tolled, for the purpose of rousing up the London 
people, who armed themselves at the dismal sound and formed quite 
an army in the streets. I am sorry to say, however, that instead 
of falling upon the King's party with whom their quarrel was, 
they fell upon the miserable Jews, and killed at least five hundred 
of them. They pretended that some of these Jews were on the ^ 
King's side, and that they kept hidden in their houses, for thei; 
destruction of the people, a certain terrible composition called Greek*; 
Fire, which could not be put out with water, but only burnt the 
fiercer for it. What they really did keep in their houses was money ; 
and this their cruel enemies wanted, and this their cruel enemies | 
took, like robbers and murderers. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 431 

The Earl of Leicester put himself at the head of these Londoners 
and other forces, and followed the King to Lewes in Sussex, where 
he lay encamped with his army. Before giving the King's forces 
battle here, the Earl addressed his soldiers, and said that King 
Henry the Third had broken so many oaths, that he had become 
the enemy of God, and therefore they would wear white crosses on 
their breasts, as if they were arrayed, not against a fellow-Christian, 
but against a Turk. White-crossed accordingly, they rushed into 
the fight. They vrould have lost the day — the King having on 
his side all the foreigners in England : and, from Scotland, John 
CoMYN", John Baliol, and Robert Beuce, with all their men — 
but for the impatience of Prince Edward, who, in his hot desire 
to have vengeance on the people of London, threw the whole of his 
father's army into confusion. He was taken Prisoner; so was the 
King; so was the King's brother the King of the Romans ; and five 
thousand Englishmen were left dead upon the bloody grass. 

For this success, the Pope excommunicated the Earl of Leicester : 
which neither the Earl nor the people cared at all about. The 
people loved him and supported him, and he became the real King ; 
having all the power of the government in his own hands, though 
he was outwardly respectful to King Henry the Third, whom he 
took with him wherever he went, like a poor old limp court-card. 
He summoned a Parliament (in the year one thousand two hun- 
dred and sixty-five) which was the first Parliament in England that 
the people had any real share in electing ; and he grew more and 
more in favour with the people every day, and they stood by him 
in whatever he did. 

Many of the other Barons, and particularly the Earl of Glouces- 
ter, who had become by this time as proud as his father, grew 
jealous of this powerful and popular Earl, who was proud too, and 
began to conspire against him. Since the battle of Lewes, Prince 
Edward had been kept as a hostage, and, though he was otherwise 
treated like a Prince, had never been allowed to go out without 
attendants appointed by the Earl of Leicester, who watched him. 
The conspiring Lords found means to propose to him, in secret, that 
they should assist him to escape, and should make him their leader; 
to which he very heartily consented. 

So, on a day that was agreed upon, he said to his attendants 
after dinner (being then at Hereford), " I should like to ride on 
horseback, this fine afternoon, a little way into the country." As 
they, too, thought it would be very pleasant to have a canter in 
the sunshine, they all rode out of the town together in a gay little 
troop. When they came to a fine level piece of turf, the Prince 
fell to comparing their horses one with another, and offering bets 



432 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

that one was faster than another ; and the attendants, suspecting 
no harm, rode galloping matches until their horses were quite tired. 
The Prince rode no matches himself, but looked on from his saddle, 
and staked his money. Thus they passed the whole merry after- 
noon. Now, the sun was setting, and they were all going slowly 
up a hill, the Prince's horse very fresh and aU the other horses 
very weary, when a strange rider mounted on a grey steed ap- 
peared at the top of the hill, and waved his hat. " What does 
the fellow mean?" said the attendants one to another. The 
Prince answered on the instant by setting spurs to his horse, dash- 
ing away at his utmost speed, joining the man, riding into the 
midst of a little crowd of horsemen who were then seen waiting 
under some trees, and who closed around him ; and so he departed 
in a cloud of dust, leaving the road empty of all but the baffled 
attendants, who sat looking at one another, while their horses 
drooped their ears and panted. 

The Prince joined the Earl of Gloucester at Ludlow. The Earl 
of Leicester, with a part of the army and the stupid old King, 
was at Hereford. One of the Earl of Leicester's sons, Simon de 
Montfort, with another part of the army, was in Sussex. To pre- 
vent these two parts from uniting was the Prince's first object. 
He attacked Simon de Montfort by night, defeated him, seized his 
banners and treasure, and forced him into Kenilworth Castle in 
Warwickshire, which belonged to his family. 

His father, the Earl of Leicester, in the meanwhile, not know- 
ing what had happened, marched out of Hereford, with his part of 
the army and the King, to meet him. He came, on a bright morn- 
ing in August, to Evesham, which is watered by the pleasant river 
Avon. Looking rather anxiously across the prospect towards Kenil- 
worth, he saw his own banners advancing ; and his face brightened 
with joy. But, it clouded darkly when he presently perceived that 
the banners were captured, and in the enemy's hands ; and he said, 
"It is over. The Lord have mercy on our souls, for our bodies are 
Prince Edward's ! " 

He fought like a true Knight, nevertheless. When his horse 
was killed under him, he fought on foot. It was a fierce battle, 
and the dead lay in heaps everywhere. The old King, stuck up in 
a suit of armour on a big war-horse, which didn't mind him at all, 
and which carried him into all sorts of places where he didn't 
want to go, got into everybody's way, and very nearly got knocked 
on the head by one of his son's men. But he managed to pipe out, 
" I am Harry of Winchester ! " and the Prince, who heard him, 
seized his bridle, and took him out of peril. The Earl of Leicester 
still fought bravely, until his best son Henry was killed, and the 



I 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 433 

bodies of his best friends choked his path ; and then he fell, still 
fighting, sword in hand. They mangled his body, and sent it as a 
present to a noble lady — but a very unpleasant lady, I should 
think — who was the wife of his worst enemy. They could not 
mangle his memory in the minds of the faithful people, though. 
Many years afterwards, they loved him more than ever, and re- 
garded him as a Saint, and always spoke of him as " Sir Simon 
the Righteous." 

And even though he was dead, the cause for which he had fought 
still lived, and was strong, and forced itself upon the King in the 
very hour of victory. Henry found himself obliged to respect the 
Great Charter, however much he hated it, and to make laws similar 
to the laws of the Great Earl of Leicester, and to be moderate and 
forgiving towards the people at last — even towards the people of 
London, who had so long opposed him. There were more risings 
before all this was done, but they were set at rest by these means, 
and Prince Edward did his best in all things to restore peace. 
One Sir Adam de Gourdon was the last dissatisfied knight in 
arms ; but, the Prince vanquished him in single combat, in a wood, 
and nobly gave him his life, and became his friend, instead of slay- 
ing him. Sir Adam was not ungrateful. He ever afterwards 
remained devoted to his generous conqueror. 

When the troubles of the Kingdom were thus calmed. Prince 
Edward and his cousin Henry took the Cross, and went away to 
the Holy Land, with many English Lords and Knights. Four 
years afterwards the King of the Romans died, and, next year 
(one thousand two hundred and seventy-two), his brother the weak 
King of England died. He was sixty-eight years old then, and 
had reigned fifty-six years. He was as much of a King in death, 
as he had ever been in life. He was the mere pale shadow of a 
King at all times. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE FIRST, CALLED LONGSHANKS. 

It was now the year of our Lord one thousand two hundred and 
seventy-two ; and Prince Edward, the heir to the throne, being 
away in the Holy Land, knew nothing of his father's death. The 
Barons, however, proclaimed him King, immediately after the Royal 
funeral ; and the people very willingly consented, since most men 
knew too well by this time what the horrors of a contest for the 
crown were. So King Edward the First, called, in a not very com- 
2f 



434 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 

plimentary manner, Longshanks, because of the slenderness of his 
legs, was peacefully accepted by the English Nation. 

His legs had need to be strong, however long and thin they 
were; for they had to support him through many diflBculties on 
the fiery sands of Asia, where his small force of soldiers fainted, 
died, deserted, and seemed to melt away. But his prowess made 
light of it, and he said, " I will go on, if I go on with no other 
follower than my groom ! " 

A Prince of this spirit gave the Turks a deal of trouble. He 
stormed Nazareth, at which place, of all places on earth, I am 
sorry to relate, he made a frightful slaughter of innocent people ; 
and then he went to Acre, where he got a truce of ten years from 
the Sultan. He had very nearly lost his life in Acre, through the 
treachery of a Saracen Noble, called the Emir of Jaffa, who, mak- 
ing the pretence that he had some idea of turning Christian and 
wanted to know all about that religion, sent a trusty messenger to 
Edward very often — with a dagger in his sleeve. At last, one 
Friday in Whitsun week, when it was very hot, and all the sandy 
prospect lay beneath the blazing sun, burnt up like a great over- 
done biscuit, and Edward was lying on a couch, dressed for coolness 
in only a loose robe, the messenger, with his chocolate-coloured face 
and his bright dark eyes and white teeth, came creeping in with 
a letter, and kneeled down like a tame tiger. But, the moment 
Edward stretched out his hand to take the letter, the tiger made 
a spring at his heart. He was quick, but Edward was quick too. 
He seized the traitor by his chocolate throat, threw him to the 
ground, and slew him with the very dagger he had drawn. The 
weapon had struck Edward in the arm, and although the wound 
itself was slight, it threatened to be mortal, for the blade of the 
dagger had been smeared with poison. Thanks, however, to a 
better surgeon than was often to be found in those times, and to 
some wholesome herbs, and above all, to his faithful wife, Eleanor, 
who devotedly nursed him, and is said by some to have sucked the 
poison from the wound with her own red lips (which I am very 
willing to believe), Edward soon recovered and was sound again. 

As the King his father had sent entreaties to him to return 
home, he now began the journey. He had got as far as Italy, 
when he met messengers who brought him intelligence of the 
King's death. Hearing that all was quiet at home, he made no 
haste to return to his own dominions, but paid a visit to the Pope, 
and went in state through various Italian Towns, where he was 
welcomed with acclamations as a mighty champion of the Cross 
from the Holy Land, and where he received presents of purple 
mantles and prancing horses, and went along in great triumph. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 435 

The shouting people little knew that he was the last English mon- 
arch who would ever embark in a crusade, or that within twenty 
years every conquest which the Christians had made in the Holy 
Land at the cost of so much blood, would be won back by the 
Turks. But all this came to pass. 

There was, and there is, an old town standing in a plain in 
France, called Chalons. When the King was coming towards this 
place on his way to England, a wily French Lord, called the Count 
of Chalons, sent him a polite challenge to come with his knights 
and hold a fair tournament with the Count and his knights, and 
make a day of it with sword and lance. It was represented to the 
King that the Count of Chalons was not to be trusted, and that, 
instead of a holiday fight for mere show and in good humour, he 
secretly meant a real battle, in which the English should be defeated 
by superior force. 

The King, however, nothing afraid, went to the appointed place 
on the appointed day with a thousand followers. When the Count 
came with two thousand and attacked the English in earnest, the 
English rushed at them with such valour that the Count's men 
and the Count's horses soon began to be tumbled down all over the 
field. The Count himself seized the King round the neck, but 
the King tumbled him out of his saddle in return for the compli- 
ment, and, jumping from his own horse, and standing over him, 
beat away at his iron armour like a blacksmith hammering on his 
anvil. Even when the Count owned himself defeated and offered 
his sword, the King would not do him the honour to take it, but 
made him yield it up to a common soldier. There had been such 
fury shown in this fight, that it was afterwards called the little 
Battle of Chalons. 

The English were very well disposed to be proud of their King 
after these adventures ; so, when he landed at Dover in the year 
one thousand two hundred and seventy-four (being then thirty-six 
years old), and went on to Westminster where he and his good 
Queen were crowned with great magnificence, splendid rejoicings 
took place. For the coronation-feast there were provided, among 
other eatables, four hundred oxen, four hundred sheep, four hun- 
dred and fifty pigs, eighteen wild boars, three hundred flitches of 
bacon, and twenty thousand fowls. The fountains and conduits in 
the street flowed with red and white wine instead of water ; the 
rich citizens hung silks and cloths of the brightest colours out of 
their windows to increase the beauty of the show, and threw out 
gold and silver by whole handfuls to make scrambles for the crowd. 
In short, there was such eating and drinking, such music and 
capering, such a ringing of bells and tossing of caps, such a shout- 



436 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ing, and singing, and revelling, as the narrow overhanging streets 
of old London City had not witnessed for many a long day. All 
the people were merry — except the poor Jews, who, trembling 
within their houses, and scarcely daring to peep out, began to fore- 
see that they would have to find the money for this joviality sooner 
or later. 

To dismiss this sad subject of the Jews for the present, I am 
sorry to add that in this reign they were most unmercifully pil- 
laged. They were hanged in great numbers, on accusations of hav- 
ing clipped the King's coin — which all kinds of people had done. 
They were heavily taxed ; they were disgracefully badged ; they 
were, on one day, thirteen years after the coronation, taken up with 
their wives and children and thrown into beastly prisons, until they 
purchased their release by paying to the King twelve thousand 
pounds. Finally, every kind of property belonging to them was 
seized by the King, except so little as would defray the charge of 
their taking themselves away into foreign countries. Many years 
elapsed before the hope of gain induced any of their race to return 
to England, where they had been treated so heartlessly and had 
suffered so much. 

If King Edward the Pirst had been as bad a king to Christians 
as he was to Jews, he would have been bad indeed. But he was, 
in general, a wise and great monarch, under whom the country 
much improved. He had no love for the Great Charter — few 
Kings had, through many many years — but he had high qualities. 
The first bold object which he conceived when he came home, was 
to unite, under one Sovereign, England, Scotland, and Wales ; the 
two last of which countries had each a little king of its own, about 
whom the people were always quarrelling and fighting, and mak- 
ing a prodigious disturbance — a great deal more than he was 
worth. In the course of King Edward's reign he was engaged, 
besides, in a war with France. To make these quarrels clearer, 
we will separate their histories and take them thus. Wales, first. 
France, second. Scotland, third. 

Llewellyn was the Prince of Wales. He had been on the side 
of the Barons in the reign of the stupid old King, but had after- 
wards sworn allegiance to him. AVhen King Edward came to the 
throne, Llewellyn was required to swear allegiance to him also ; 
which he refused to do. The King, being crowned and in his own 
dominions, three times more required Llewellyn to come and do 
homage ; and three times more Llewellyn said he would rather not. 
He was going to be married to Eleanor de Montfort, a young 
lady of the family mentioned in the last reign ; and it chanced that 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 437 

this young lady, coming from France with her youngest brother, 
Emeric, was taken by an English ship, and was ordered by the 
English King to be detained. Upon this, the quarrel came to a 
head. The King went, with his fleet, to the coast of Wales, 
where, so encompassing Llewellyn, that he could only take refuge 
in the bleak mountain region of Snowdon in which no provisions 
could reach him, he was soon starved into an apology, and into a 
treaty of peace, and into paying the expenses of the war. The 
King, however, forgave him some of the hardest conditions of the 
treaty, and consented to his marriage. And he now thought he 
had reduced AVales to obedience. 

But, the Welsh, although they were naturally a gentle, quiet, 
pleasant people, who liked to receive strangers in their cottages 
among the mountains, and to set before them with free hospitality 
whatever they had to eat and drink, and to play to them on their 
harps, and sing their native ballads to them, were a people of great 
spirit when their blood was up. Englishmen, after this afikir, 
began to be insolent in Wales, and to assume the air of masters ; 
and the Welsh pride could not bear it. Moreover, they believed in 
that unlucky old Merlin, some of whose unlucky old prophecies 
somebody always seemed doomed to remember when there was a 
chance of its doing harm ; and just at this time some blind old 
gentleman with a harp and a long white beard, who was an excel- 
lent person, but had become of an unknown age and tedious, burst 
out with a declaration that Merlin had predicted that when English 
money had become round, a Prince of Wales would be crowned in 
London. Now, King Edward had recently forbidden the English 
penny to be cut into halves and quarters for halfpence and farthings, 
and had actually introduced a round coin; therefore, the Welsh 
people said this was the time Merlin meant, and rose accordingly. 

King Edward had bought over Peince David, Llewellyn's 
brother, by heaping favours upon him ; but he was the first to re- 
volt, being perhaps troubled in his conscience. One stormy night, 
he surprised the Castle of Hawarden, in possession of which an Eng- 
lish nobleman had been left ; killed the whole garrison, and carried 
off the nobleman a prisoner to Snowdon. Upon this, the Welsh 
people rose like one man. King Edward, with his army, march- 
ing from Worcester to the Menai Strait, crossed it — near to where 
the wonderful tubular iron bridge now, in days so different, makes 
a passage for railway trains — by a bridge of boats that enabled 
forty men to march abreast. He subdued the Island of Anglesea, 
and sent his men forward to observe the enemy. The sudden ap- 
pearance of the Welsh created a panic among them, and they fell 
back to the bridge. The tide had in the meantime risen and sepa- 



438 A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 

rated the boats ; the Welsh pursuing them, they were driven into 
the sea, and there they sunk, in their heavy iron armour, by thou- 
sands. After this victory Llewellyn, helped by the severe winter- 
weather of Wales, gained another battle ; but the King ordering 
a portion of his English army to advance through South Wales, 
and catch him between two foes, and Llewellyn bravely turning to 
meet this new enemy, he was surprised and killed — very meanly, 
for he was unarmed and defenceless. His head was struck off and 
sent to London, where it was fixed upon the Tower, encircled with 
a wreath, some say of ivy, some say of willow, some say of silver, 
to make it look like a ghastly coin in ridicule of the prediction. 

David, however, still held out for six months, though eagerly 
sought after by the King, and hunted by his own countrymen. 
One of them finally betrayed him with his wife and children. He 
was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered ; and from that 
time this became the established punishment of Traitors in Eng- 
land — a punishment wholly without excuse, as being revolting, 
vile, and cruel, after its object is dead ; and which has no sense in 
it, as its only real degradation (and that nothing can blot out) is 
to the country that permits on any consideration such abominable 
barbarity. 

Wales was now subdued. The Queen giving birth to a young 
prince in the Castle of Carnarvon, the King showed him to the 
Welsh people as their countryman, and called him Prince of 
Wales ; a title that has ever since been borne by the heir-apparent 
to the English Throne — which that little Prince soon became, by 
the death of his elder brother. The King did better things for 
the Welsh than that, by improving their laws and encouraging 
their trade. Disturbances still took place, chiefly occasioned by 
the avarice and pride of the English Lords, on whom Welsh lands 
and castles had been bestowed ; but they were subdued, and the 
country never rose again. There is a legend that to prevent the 
people from being incited to rebellion by the songs of their bards 
and harpers, Edward had them all put to death. Some of them 
may have fallen among other men who held out against the King ; 
but this general slaughter is, I think, a fancy of the harpers them- 
selves, who, I dare say, made a song about it many years after- 
wards, and sang it by the Welsh firesides until it came to be 
believed. 

The foreign war of the reign of Edward the First arose in this 
way. The crew^s of two vessels, one a Norman ship, and the other 
an English ship, happened to go to the same place in their boats to 
fill their casks with fresh water. Being rough angry fellows, they 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 439 

began to quarrel, and then to fight — the English with their fists ; 
the Normans with their knives — and, in the fight, a Norman was 
killed. The Norman crew, instead of revenging themselves upon 
those English sailors with whom they had quarrelled (who were 
too strong for them, I suspect), took to their ship again in a great 
rage, attacked the first English ship they met, laid hold of an un- 
ofifending merchant who happened to be on board, and brutally 
hanged him in the rigging of their own vessel with a dog at his 
feet. This so enraged the English sailors that there was no re- 
straining them ; and whenever, and wherever, English sailors met 
Norman sailors, they fell upon each other tooth and nail. The 
Irish and Dutch sailors took part with the English ; the French 
and Genoese sailors helped the Normans ; and thus the greater 
part of the mariners sailing over the sea became, in their way, as 
violent and raging as the sea itself when it is disturbed. 

King Edward's fame had been so high abroad that he had been 
chosen to decide a difference between France and another foreign 
power, and had lived upon the Continent three years. At first, 
neither he nor the French King Philip (the good Louis had been 
dead some time) interfered in these quarrels ; but when a fleet of 
eighty English ships engaged and utterly defeated a Norman fleet 
of two hundred, in a pitched battle fought round a ship at anchor, 
in which no quarter was given, the matter became too serious to be 
passed over. King Edward, as Duke of Guienne, was summoned 
to present himself before the King of France, at Paris, and answer 
for the damage done by his sailor subjects. At first, he sent the 
Bishop of London as his representative, and then his brother 
Edmukd, who was married to the French Queen's mother. I am 
afraid Edmund was an easy man, and allowed himself to be talked 
over by his charming relations, the French court ladies ; at all 
events, he was induced to give up his brother's dukedom for forty 
days — as a mere form, the French King said, to satisfy his honour 
— and he was so very much astonished, when the time was out, 
to find that the French King had no idea of giving it up again, 
that I should not wonder if it hastened his death : which soon 
took place. 

King Edward was a King to win his foreign dukedom back again, 
if it could be won by energy and valour. He raised a large army, 
renounced his allegiance as Duke of Guienne, and crossed the sea 
to carry war into France. Before any important battle was fought, 
however, a truce was agreed upon for two years ; and in the course 
of that time, the Pope effected a reconciliation. King Edward, 
who was now a widower, having lost his affectionate and good wife, 
Eleanor, married the French King's sister, Mabgaeetj and the 



440 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Prince of Wales was contracted to the French King's daughter 
Isabella. 

Out of bad things, good things sometimes arise. Out of this 
hanging of the innocent merchant, and the bloodshed and strife it 
caused, there came to be established one of the greatest powers 
that the English people now possess. The preparations for the 
war being very expensive, and King Edward greatly wanting money, 
and being very arbitrary in his ways of raising it, some of the 
Barons began firmly to oppose him. Two of them, in particular, 
Humphrey Bohun, Earl of Hereford, and Roger Bigod, Earl of 
Norfolk, were so stout against him, that they maintained he had 
no right to command them to head his forces in Guienne, and flatly 
refused to go there. "By Heaven, Sir Earl," said the King to the 
Earl of Hereford, in a great passion, "you shall either go or be 
hanged!" "By Heaven, Sir King," replied the Earl, "I will 
neither go nor yet will I be hanged ! " and both he and the other 
Earl sturdily left the court, attended by many Lords. The King 
tried every means of raising money. He taxed the clergy, in spite 
of all the Pope said to the contrary; and when they refused to 
pay, reduced them to submission, by saying Very well, then they 
had no claim upon the government for protection, and any man 
might plunder them who would — which a good many men were 
very ready to do, and very readily did, and which the clergy found 
too losing a game to be played at long. He seized all the wool 
and leather in the hands of the merchants, promising to pay for it 
some fine day ; and he set a tax upon the exportation of wool, 
which was so unpopular among the traders that it was called " The 
evil toll." But all would not do. The Barons, led by those two 
great Earls, declared any taxes imposed without the consent of 
Parliament, unlawful ; and the Parliament refused to impose taxes, 
until the King should confirm afresh the two Great Charters, and 
should solemnly declare in writing, that there was no power in the 
country to raise money from the people, evermore, but the power 
of Parliament representing all ranks of the people. The King was 
very unwilling to diminish his own power by allowing this great 
privilege in the Parliament ; but there was no help for it, and he 
at last complied. We shall come to another King by-and-bye, who 
might have saved his head from rolling off, if he had profited by 
this example. 

The people gained other benefits in Parliament from the good 
sense and wisdom of this King. Many of the laws were much im- 
proved ; provision was made for the greater safety of travellers, and 
the apprehension of thieves and murderers ; the priests were pre- 
vented from holding too much land, and so becoming too powerful ; 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 441 

and Justices of the Peace were first appointed (though not at first 
under that name) in various parts of the country. 

And now we come to Scotland, which was the great and lasting 
trouble of the reign of King Edward the First. 

About thirteen years after King Edward's coronation, Alexander 
the Third, the King of Scotland, died of a fall from his horse. He 
had been married to Margaret, King Edward's sister. All their 
children being dead, the Scottish crown became the right of a 
young Princess only eight years old, the daughter of Eric, King of 
Norway, who had married a daughter of the deceased sovereign. 
King Edward proposed, that the Maiden of Norway, as this Prin- 
cess was called, should be engaged to be married to his eldest son ; 
but, unfortunately, as she was coming over to England she fell sick, 
and landing on one of the Orkney Islands, died there. A great com- 
motion immediately began in Scotland, where as many as thirteen 
noisy claimants to the vacant throne started up and made a general 
confusion. 

King Edward being much renowned for his sagacity and justice, 
it seems to have been agreed to refer the dispute to him. He ac- 
cepted the trust, and went, with an army, to the Border-land where 
England and Scotland joined. There, he called upon the Scottish 
gentlemen to meet him at the Castle of Norham, on the English 
side of the river Tweed; and to that Castle they came. But, before 
he would take any step in the business, he required those Scottish 
gentlemen, one and all, to do homage to him as their superior 
Lord; and when they hesitated, he said, "By holy Edward, whose 
crown I wear, I will have my rights, or I will die in maintaining 
them ! " The Scottish gentlemen, who had not expected this, were 
disconcerted, and asked for three weeks to think about it. 

At the end of the three weeks, another meeting took place, on a 
green plain on the Scottish side of the river. Of all the competi- 
tors for the Scottish throne, there were only two who had any real 
claim, in right of their near kindred to the Royal family. These 
were John Baliol and Robert Bruce : and the right was, I 
have no doubt, on the side of John Baliol. At this particular 
meeting John Baliol was not present, but Robert Bruce was ; and 
on Robert Bruce being formally asked whether he acknowledged the 
King of England for his superior lord, he answered, plainly and 
distinctly. Yes, he did. Next day, John Baliol appeared, and said 
the same. This point settled, some arrangements were made for 
inquiring into their titles. 

The inquiry occupied a pretty long time — more than a year. 
While it was going on. King Edward took the opportunity of mak- 



442 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ing a journey through Scotland, and calling upon the Scottish people 
of all degrees to acknowledge themselves his vassals, or be impris- 
oned until they did. In the meanwhile, Commissioners were ap- 
pointed to conduct the inquiry, a Parliament was held at Berwick 
about it, the two claimants were heard at full length, and there was 
a vast amount of talking. At last, in the great hall of the Castle 
of Berwick, the King gave judgment in favour of John Baliol : who, 
consenting to receive his crown by the King of England's favour and 
permission, was crowned at Scone, in an old stone chair which Had 
been used for ages in the abbey there, at the coronations of Scottish 
Kings. Then, King Edward caused the great seal of Scotland, used 
since the late King's death, to be broken in four pieces, and placed 
in the English Treasury ; and considered that he now had Scotland 
(according to the common saying) under his thumb. 

Scotland had a strong will of its own yet, however. King Ed- 
ward, determined that the Scottish King should not forget he was 
his vassal, summoned him repeatedly to come and defend himself 
and his Judges before the English Parliament when appeals from 
the decisions of Scottish courts of justice were being heard. At 
length, John Baliol, who had no great heart of his own, had so much 
heart put into him by the brave spirit of the Scottish people, who 
took this as a national insult, that he refused to come any more. 
Thereupon, the King further required him to help him in his war 
abroad (which was then in progress), and to give up, as security 
for his good behaviour in future, the three strong Scottish Castles 
of Jedburgh, Roxburgh, and Berwick. Nothing of this being done ; 
on the contrary, the Scottish people concealing their King among 
their mountains in the Highlands and showing a determination to 
resist ; Edward marched to Berwick with an army of thirty thou- 
sand foot, and four thousand horse ; took the Castle, and slew its 
whole garrison, and the inhabitants of the town as well — men, 
women, and children. Lokd Wareenne, Earl of Surrey, then went 
on to the Castle of Dunbar, before which a battle was fought, and 
the whole Scottish army defeated with great slaughter. The vic- 
tory being complete, the Eari of Surrey was left as guardian of 
Scotland ; the principal offices in that kingdom were given to Eng- 
lishmen ; the more powerful Scottish Nobles were obliged to come 
and live in England ; the Scottish crown and sceptre were brought 
away ; and even the old stone chair was carried off and placed in 
Westminster Abbey, where you may see it now. Baliol had the 
Tower of London lent him for a residence, with permission to 
range about within a circle of twenty miles. Three years after- 
wards he was allowed to go to Normandy, where he had estates, 
and where he passed the remaining six years of his life : far 



A CHILD'S. HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 443 

more happily, I dare say, than he had lived for a long while in 
angry Scotland. 

Now, there was, in the West of Scotland, a gentleman of small 
fortune, named William Wallace, the second son of a Scottish 
knight. He was a man of great size and great strength : he was 
very brave and daring ; when he spoke to a body of his country- 
men, he could rouse them in a wonderful manner by the power of 
his burning words ; he loved Scotland dearly, and he hated Eng- 
land with his utmost might; The domineering conduct of the 
English who now held the places of trust in Scotland made them 
as intolerable to the proud Scottish people as they had been, under 
similar circumstances, to the Welsh ; and no man in all Scotland 
regarded them with so much smothered rage as William Wallace. 
One day, an Englishman in office, little knowing what he was, 
affronted him. Wallace instantly struck him dead, and taking 
refuge among the rocks and hills, and there joining with his country- 
man. Sir William Douglas, who was also in arms against King 
Edward, became the most resolute and undaunted champion of a 
people struggling for their independence that ever lived upon the 
earth. 

The English Guardian of the Kingdom fled before him, and, thus 
encouraged, the Scottish people revolted everywhere, and fell upon 
the English without mercy. The Earl of Surrey, by the King's 
commands, raised all the power of the Border-counties, and two 
English armies poured into Scotland. Only one Chief, in the face 
of those armies, stood by Wallace, who, with a force of forty thou- 
sand men, awaited the invaders at a place on the river Forth, within 
two miles of Stirling. Across the river there was only one poor 
wooden bridge, called the bridge of Kildean — so narrow, that but . 
two men could cross it abreast. With his eyes upon this bridge, 
Wallace posted the greater part of his men among some rising 
grounds, and waited calmly. When the English army came up on 
the opposite bank of the river, messengers were sent forward to 
offer terms. Wallace sent them back with a defiance, in the name 
of the freedom of Scotland. Some of the officers of the Earl of 
Surrey in command of the English, with their eyes also on the 
bridge, advised him to be discreet and not hasty. He, however, 
urged to immediate battle by some other officers, and particularly by 
Cressingham, King Edward's treasurer, and a rash man, gave the 
word of command to advance. One thousand English crossed the 
bridge, two abreast ; the Scottish troops were as motionless as stone 
images. Two thousand English crossed ; three thousand, four 
thousand, five. Not a feather, all this time, had been seen to stir 
among the Scottish bonnets. Now, they all fluttered. " Forward, 



444 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

one party, to the foot of the Bridge ! " cried Wallace, "and let no 
more English cross ! The rest, down with me on the five thousand 
who have come over, and cut them all to pieces ! " It was done, in 
the sight of the whole remainder of the English army, who could 
give no help. Cressingham himself was killed, and the Scotch made 
whips for their horses of his skin. 

King Edward was abroad at this time and during the successes 
on the Scottish side which followed, and which enabled bold Wallace 
to win the whole country back again, and even to ravage the Eng- 
lish borders. But, after a few winter months, the King returned, 
and took the field with more than his usual energy. One night, 
when a kick from his horse as they both lay on the ground together 
broke two of his ribs, and a cry arose that he was killed, he leaped 
into his saddle, regardless of the pain he suffered, and rode through 
the camp. Day then appearing, he gave the word (still, of course, 
in that bruised and aching state) Forward ! and led his army on to 
near Falkirk, where the Scottish forces were seen drawn up on 
some stony ground, behind a morass. Here, he defeated Wallace, 
and killed fifteen thousand of his men. With the shattered re- 
mainder, W^allace drew back to Stirling; but, being pursued, set 
fire to the town that it might give no help to the English, and 
escaped. The inhabitants of Perth afterwards set fire to their 
houses for the same reason, and the King, unable to find provisions, 
was forced to withdraw his army. 

Another Robert Bruce, the grandson of him who had disputed 
the Scottish crown with Baliol, was now in arms against the King 
(that elder Bruce being dead), and also John Comyn, Baliol's 
nephew. These two young men might agree in opposing Edward, 
but could agree in nothing else, as they were rivals for the throne 
of Scotland. Probably it was because they knew this, and knew 
what troubles must arise even if they could hope to get the better 
of the great English King, that the principal Scottish people applied 
to the Pope for his interference. The Pope, on the principle of 
losing nothing for want of trying to get it, very coolly claimed that 
Scotland belonged to him ; but this was a little too much, and the 
Parliament in a friendly manner told him so. 

In the spring time of the year one thousand three hundred and 
three, the King sent Sir John Segrave, whom he made Governor 
of Scotland, with twenty thousand men, to reduce the rebels. Sir 
John was not as careful as he should have been, but encamped at 
Rosslyn, near Edinburgh, with his army divided into three parts. 
The Scottish forces saw their advantage ; fell on each part sepa- 
rately; defeated each; and killed all the prisoners. Then, came the 
King himself once more, as soon as a great army could be raised ; 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 445 

he passed through the whole north of Scotland, laying waste what- 
soever came in his way ; and he took up his winter quarters at 
Dunfermline. The Scottish cause now looked so hopeless, that 
ComjTi and the other nobles made submission and received their 
pardons. Wallace alone stood out. He was invited to surrender, 
though on no distinct pledge that his life should be spared ; but he 
still defied the ireful King, and lived among the steep crags of the 
Highland glens, where the eagles made their nests, and where the 
mountain torrents roared, and the white snow was deep, and the bit- 
ter winds blew round his unsheltered head, as he lay through many 
a pitch-dark night wrapped up in his plaid. Nothing could break 
his spirit ; nothing could lower his courage ; nothing could induce 
him to forget or to forgive his country's wrongs. Even when the 
Castle of Stirling, which had long held out, was besieged by the 
King with every kind of military engine then in use ; even when 
the lead upon cathedral roofs was taken down to help to make them ; 
even when the King, though an old man, commanded in the siege 
as if he were a youth, being so resolved to conquer; even when the 
brave garrison (then found with amazement to be not two hundred 
people, including several ladies) were starved and beaten out and 
were made to submit on their knees, and with every form of dis- 
grace that could aggravate their sufferings ; even then, when there 
was not a ray of hope in Scotland, William Wallace was as proud 
and firm as if he had beheld the powerful and relentless Edward 
lying dead at his feet. 

Who betrayed William Wallace in the end, is not quite certain. 
That he was betrayed — probably by an attendant — is too true. 
He was taken to the Castle of Dumbarton, under Sir John Men- 
TEiTH, and thence to London, where the great fame of his bravery 
and resolution attracted immense concourses of people to behold 
him. He was tried in Westminster Hall, with a crown of laurel on 
his head — it is supposed because he was reported to have said that 
he ought to wear, or that he would wear, a crown there — and was 
found guilty as a robber, a murderer, and a traitor. What they 
called a robber (he said to those who tried him) he was, because he 
had taken spoil from the King's men. What they called a mur- 
derer, he was, because he had slain an insolent Englishman. What 
they called a traitor, he was not, for he had never sworn allegiance 
to the King, and had ever scorned to do it. He was dragged at 
the tails of horses to West Smithfield, and there hanged on a high 
gallows, torn open before he was dead, beheaded, and quartered. 
His head was set upon a pole on London Bridge, his right arm was 
sent to Newcastle, his left arm to Berwick, his legs to Perth and 
Aberdeen. But, if King Edward had had his body cut into inches, 



446 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

and had sent every separate inch into a separate town, he could 
not have dispersed it half so far and wide as his fame. Wallace 
will be remembered in songs and stories, while there are songs and 
stories in the English tongue, and Scotland will hold him dear 
while her lakes and mountains last. 

Keleased from this dreaded enemy, the King made a fairer plan 
of Government for Scotland, divided the offices of honour among 
Scottish gentlemen and English gentlemen, forgave past offences, 
and thought, in his old age, that his work was done. 

But he deceived himself. Comyn and Bruce conspired, and 
made an appointment to meet at Dumfries, in the Church of the 
Minorites. There is a story that Comyn was false to Bruce, and 
had informed against him to the King ; that Bruce was warned 
of his danger and the necessity of flight, by receiving, one night 
as he sat at supper, from his friend the Earl of Gloucester, twelve 
pennies and a pair of spurs ; that as he was riding angrily to keep 
his appointment (through a snow-storm, with his horse's shoes 
reversed that he might not be tracked), he met an evil-looking 
serving man, a messenger of Comyn, whom he killed, and con- 
cealed in whose dress he found letters that proved Comyn's treach- 
ery. However this may be, they were likely enough to quarrel 
in any case, being hot-headed rivals ; and, whatever they quarrelled 
about, they certainly did quarrel in the church where they met, 
and Bruce drew his dagger and stabbed Comyn, who fell upon the 
pavement. When Bruce came out, pale and disturbed, the friends 
who were waiting for him asked what was the matter ? "I think 
I have killed Comyn," said he. "You only think so?" returned 
one of them ; "I will make sure ! " and going into the church, 
and finding him alive, stabbed him again and again. Knowing 
that the King would never forgive this new deed of violence, the 
party then declared Bruce King of Scotland : got him crowned at 
Scone — without the chair; and set up the rebellious standard once 
again. 

When the King heard of it he kindled with fiercer anger than 
he had ever shown yet. He caused the Prince of Wales and two 
hundred and seventy of the young nobility to be knighted — the 
trees in the Temple Gardens were cut down to make room for 
their tents, and they watched their armour all night, according to 
the old usage : some in the Temple Church : some in Westmin- 
ster Abbey — and at the pubhc Feast which then took place, he 
swore, by Heaven, and by two swans covered with gold network 
which his minstrels placed upon the table, that he would avenge 
the death of Comyn, and would punish the false Bruce. And 
before all the company, he charged the Prince his son, in case that 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 447 

he should die before accomplishing his vow, not to bury him until 
it was fulfilled. Next morning the Prince and the rest of the 
young Knights rode away to the Border-country to join the English 
army ; and the King, now weak and sick, followed in a horse-litter. 

Bruce, after losing a battle and undergoing many dangers and 
much misery, fled to Ireland, where he lay concealed through the 
winter. That winter, Edward passed in hunting down and execut- 
ing Bruce's relations and adherents, sparing neither youth nor age, 
and showing no touch of pity or sign of mercy. In the following 
spring, Bruce reappeared and gained some victories. In these 
frays, both sides were grievously cruel. For instance — Bruce's 
two brothers, being taken captives desperately wounded, were 
ordered by the King to instant execution. Bruce's friend Sir 
John Douglas, taking his own Castle of Douglas out of the hands 
of an English Lord, roasted the dead bodies of the slaughtered 
garrison in a great fire made of every movable within it ; which 
dreadful cookery his men called the Douglas Larder. Bruce, 
still successful, however, drove the Earl of Pembroke and the 
Earl of Gloucester into the Castle of Ayr and laid siege to it. 

The King, who had been laid up all the winter, but had di- 
rected the army from his sick-bed, now advanced to Carlisle, and 
there, causing the litter in which he had travelled to be placed in 
the Cathedral as an offering to Heaven, mounted his horse once 
more, and for the last time. He was now sixty-nine years old, and 
had reigned thirty-five years. He was so ill, that in four days 
he could go no more than six miles ; still, even at that pace, he 
went on and resolutely kept his face towards the Border. At 
length, he lay down at the village of Burgh-upon-Sands ; and 
there, telling those around him to impress upon the Prince that he 
was to remember his father's vow, and was never to rest until he 
had thoroughly subdued Scotland, he yielded up his last breath. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

ENGLAND UNDER EDWAED THE SECOND. 

King Edward the Second, the first Prince of Wales, was 
twenty-three years old when his father died. There was a certain 
favourite of his, a young man from Gascony, named Piers Gav- 
ESTON, of whom his father had so much disapproved that he had or- 
dered him out of England, and had made his son swear by the side 
of his sick-bed, never to bring him back. But, the Prince no sooner 
found himself King, than he broke his oath, as so many other 



448 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Princes and Kings did (they were far too ready to take oaths), and 
sent for his dear friend immediately. 

Now, this same Gaveston was handsome enough, but was a reck- 
less, insolent, audacious fellow. He was detested by the proud 
English Lords : not only because he had such power over the King, 
and made the Court such a dissipated place, but, also, because he 
could ride better than they at tournaments, and was used, in his 
impudence, to cut very bad jokes on them; calling one, the old 
hog ; another, the stage-player ; another, the Jew ; another, the 
black dog of Ardenne. This was as poor wit as need be, but it 
made those Lords very wroth ; and the surly Earl of Warwick, 
who was the black dog, swore that the time should come when 
Piers Gaveston should feel the black dog's teeth. 

It was not come yet, however, nor did it seem to be coming. 
The King made him Earl of Cornwall, and gave him vast riches ; 
and, when the King went over to France to marry the French Prin- 
cess, Isabella, daughter of Philip le Bel : who was said to be 
the most beautiful woman in the world : he made Gaveston, Eegent 
of the Kingdom. His splendid marriage-ceremony in the Church 
of Our Lady at Boulogne, where there were four Kings and three 
Queens present (quite a pack of Court Cards, for I dare say the 
Knaves were not wanting), being over, he seemed to care little or 
nothing for his beautiful wife ; but was wild with impatience to 
meet Gaveston again. 

When he landed at home, he paid no attention to anybody else, 
but ran into the favourite's arms before a great concourse of people, 
and hugged him, and kissed him, and caUed him his brother. At 
the coronation which soon followed, Gaveston was the richest and 
brightest of all the glittering company there, and had the honour 
of carrying the crown. This made the proud Lords fiercer than 
ever ; the people, too, despised the favourite, and would never caU 
him Earl of Cornwall, however much he complained to the King 
and asked him to punish them for not doing so, but persisted in 
styling him plain Piers Gaveston. 

The Barons were so unceremonious with the King in giving him 
to understand that they would not bear this favourite, that the 
King was obliged to send him out of the country. The favourite 
himself was made to take an oath (more oaths !) that he would 
never come back, and the Barons supposed him to be banished in 
disgrace, until they heard that he was appointed Governor of Ire- 
land. Even this was not enough for the besotted King, who 
brought him home again in a year's time, and not only disgusted 
the Court and the people by his doting folly, but offended his beau- 
tiful wife too, who never liked him afterwards. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 449 

He had now the old Royal want — of money — and the Barons 
had the new power of positively refusing to let him raise any. He 
summoned a Parliament at York ; the Barons refused to make one, 
while the favourite was near him. He summoned another Parlia- 
ment at Westminster, and sent Gaveston away. Then, the Barons 
came, completely armed, and appointed a committee of themselves 
to correct abuses in the state and in the King's household. He 
got some money on these conditions, and directly set off with 
Gaveston to the Border-country, where they spent it in idling away 
the time, and feasting, while Bruce made ready to drive the English 
out of Scotland. For, though the old King had even made this 
poor weak son of his swear (as some say) that he would not bury 
his bones, but would have them boiled clean in a caldron, and car- 
ried before the English army until Scotland was entirely subdued, 
the second Edward was so unlike the first that Bruce gained 
strength and power every day. 

The committee of Nobles, after some months of deliberation, 
ordained that the King should henceforth call a Parliament to- 
gether, once every year, and even twice if necessary, instead of 
summoning it only when he chose. Further, that Gaveston should 
once more be banished, and, this time, on pain of death if he ever 
came back. The King's tears were of no avail ; he was obliged to 
send his favourite to Flanders. As soon as he had done so, how- 
ever, he dissolved the Parliament, with the low cunning of a mere 
fool, and set off to the North of England, thinking to get an army 
about him to oppose the Nobles, And once again he brought Gav- 
eston home, and heaped upon him all the riches and titles of which 
the Barons had deprived him. 

The Lords saw, now, that there was nothing for it but to put 
the favourite to death. They could have done so, legally, accord- 
ing to the terms of his banishment ; but they did so, I am sorry 
to say, in a shabby manner. Led by the Earl of Lancaster, the 
King's cousin, they first of all attacked the King and Gaveston at 
Newcastle. They had time to escape by sea, and the mean King, 
having his precious Gaveston with him, was quite content to leave 
his lovely wife behind. "When they were comparatively safe, they 
separated ; the King went to York to collect a force of soldiers ; 
and the favourite shut himself up, in the meantime, in Scarborough 
Castle overlooking the sea. This was what the Barons wanted. 
They knew that the Castle could not hold out ; they attacked it, 
and made Gaveston surrender. He delivered himself up to the 
Earl of Pembroke — that Lord whom he had called the Jew — on 
the Earl's pledging his faith and knightly word, that no harm 
should happen to him and no violence be done him. 



450 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Now, it was agreed with Gaveston that he should be taken 
to the Castle of Wallingford, and there kept in honourable custody. 
They travelled as far as Dedington, near Banbury, where, in the 
Castle of that place, they stopped for a night to rest. Whether 
the Earl of Pembroke left his prisoner there, knowing what would 
happen, or really left him thinking no harm, and only going (as he 
pretended) to visit his wife, the Countess, who was in the neighbour- 
hood, is no great matter now ; in any case, he was bound as an 
honourable gentleman to protect his prisoner, and he did not do it. 
In the morning, while the favourite was yet in bed, he was required 
to dress himself and come down into the courtyard. He did so 
without any mistrust, but started and turned pale when he found 
it full of strange armed men. " I think you know me ? " said their 
leader, also armed from head to foot. "I am the black dog of 
Ardenne ! " 

The time was come when Piers G-aveston was to feel the black 
dog's teeth indeed. They set him on a mule, and carried him, in 
mock state and with military music, to the black dog's kennel — 
Warwick Castle — where a hasty council, composed of some great 
noblemen, considered what should be done with him. Some were 
for sparing him, but one loud voice — it was the black dog's bark, 
I dare say — sounded through the Castle Hall, uttering these words : 
"You have the fox in your power. Let him go now, and you must 
hunt him again." 

They sentenced him to death. He threw himself at the feet of 
the Earl of Lancaster — the old hog — but the old hog was as sav- 
age as the dog. He was taken out upon the pleasant road, leading 
from Warwick to Coventry, where the beautiful river Avon, by 
which, long afterwards, William Shakespeaee was born and now 
lies buried, sparkled in the bright landscape of the beautiful May- 
day ; and there they struck off his wretched head, and stained the 
dust with his blood. 

When the King heard of this black deed, in his grief and rage he 
denounced relentless war against his Barons, and both sides were in 
arms for half a year. But, it then became necessary for them to 
join their forces against Bruce, who had used the time well while 
they were divided, and had now a great power in Scotland. 

Intelligence was brought that Bruce was then besieging Stirling 
Castle, and that the Governor had been obliged to pledge himself 
to surrender it, unless he should be relieved before a certain day. 
Hereupon, the King ordered the nobles and their fighting-men to 
meet him at Berwick ; but, the nobles cared so little for the King, 
and so neglected the summons, and lost time, that only on the day 
before that appointed for the surrender, did the King find himself 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 451 

at Stirling, and even then with a smaller force than he had expected. 
However, he had, altogether, a hundred thousand men, and Bruce 
had not more than forty thousand ; but, Bruce's army was strongly 
posted in three square columns, on the ground lying between the 
Burn or Brook of Bannock and the walls of Stirling Castle. 

On the very evening, when the King came up, Bruce did a brave 
act that encouraged his men. He was seen by a certain Henky de 
BoHUN, an English Knight, riding about before his army on a little 
horse, with a light battle-axe in his hand, and a crown of gold on 
his head. This Enghsh Knight, who was mounted on a strong 
war-horse, cased in steel, strongly armed, and able (as he thought) 
to overthrow Bruce by crushing him with his mere weight, set spurs 
to his great charger, rode on him, and made a thrust at him with 
his heavy spear. Bruce parried the thrust, and with one blow of 
his battle-axe split his skull. 

The Scottish men did not -forget this, next day when the battle 
raged. Kandolph, Bruce's valiant Nephew, rode, with the small 
body of men he commanded, into such a host of the English, all 
shining in polished armour in the sunlight, that they seemed to be 
swallowed up and lost, as if they had plunged into the sea. But, 
they fought so well, and did such dreadful execution, that the Eng- 
lish staggered. Then came Bruce himself upon them, with all the 
rest of his army. While they were thus hard pressed and amazed, 
there appeared upon the hills what they supposed to be a new 
Scottish army, but what were really only the camp followers, in 
number fifteen thousand : whom Bruce had taught to show them- 
selves at that place and time. The Earl of Gloucester, command- 
ing the English horse, made a last rush to change the fortune of the 
day ; but Bruce (like Jack the Giant-killer in the story) had had 
pits dug in the ground, and covered over with turfs and stakes. 
Into these, as they gave way beneath the weight of the horses, 
riders and horses rolled by hundreds. The English were completely 
routed; all their treasure, stores, and engines were taken by the 
Scottish men ; so many waggons and other wheeled vehicles were 
seized, that it is related that they would have reached, if they had 
been drawn out in a line, one hundred and eighty miles. The fort- 
unes of Scotland were, for the time, completely changed ; and never 
was a battle won, more famous upon Scottish ground, than this great 
battle of Bannockburn. 

Plague and famine succeeded in England ; and still the powerless 
King and his disdainful Lords were always in contention. Some 
of the turbulent chiefs of Ireland made proposals to Bruce, to accept 
the rule of that country. He sent his brother Edward to them, 
who was crowned King of Ireland. He afterwards went himself to 



452 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

help his brother in his Irish wars, but his brother was defeated in 
the end and killed. Eobert Bruce, returning to Scotland, still in- 
creased his strength there. 

As the King's ruin had begun in a favourite, so it seemed likely 
to end in one. He was too poor a creature to rely at all upon him- 
self ; and his new favourite was one Hugh le Despenser, the son 
of a gentleman of ancient family. Hugh was handsome and brave, 
but he was the favourite of a weak King, whom no man cared a 
rush for, and that was a dangerous place to hold. The Nobles 
leagued against him, because the King liked him ; and they lay in 
wait, both for his ruin and his father's. Now, the King had mar- 
ried him to the daughter of the late Earl of Gloucester, and had 
given both him and his father great possessions in Wales. In their 
endeavours to extend these, they gave violent offence to an angry 
Welsh gentleman, named John de Mowbray, and to divers other 
angry Welsh gentlemen, who resorted to arms, took their castles, 
and seized their estates. The Earl of Lancaster had first placed 
the favourite (who was a poor relation of his own) at Court, and he 
considered his own dignity offended by the preference he received 
and the honours he acquired ; so he, and the Barons who were his 
friends, joined the Welshmen, marched on London, and sent a mes- 
sage to the King demanding to have the favourite and his father 
banished. At first, the King unaccountably took it into his head to 
be spirited, and to send them a bold reply ; but when they quar- 
tered themselves around Holborn and Clerkenwell, and went down, 
armed, to the Parliament at Westminster, he gave way, and com- 
plied with their demands. 

His turn of triumph came sooner than he expected. It arose out 
of an accidental circumstance. The beautiful Queen happening to 
be travelling, came one night to one of the royal castles, and de- 
manded to be lodged and entertained there until morning. The 
governor of this castle, who was one of the enraged lords, was 
away, and in his absence, his wife refused admission to the Queen ; 
a scuffle took place among the common men on either side, and 
some of the royal attendants were killed. The people, who cared 
nothing for the King, were very angry that their beautiful Queen 
should be thus rudely treated in her own dominions ; and the King, 
taking advantage of this feeling, besieged the castle, took it, and 
then called the two Despensers home. Upon this, the confederate 
lords and the Welshmen went over to Bruce. The King encoun- 
tered them at Boroughbridge, gained the victory, and took a num- 
ber of distinguished prisoners ; among them, the Earl of Lancaster, 
now an old man, upon whose destruction he was resolved. This 
Earl was taken to his own castle of Poutefract, and there tried and 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 453 

found guilty by an unfair court appointed for the purpose ; he was 
not even allowed to speak in his own defence. He was insulted, 
pelted, mounted on a starved pony without saddle or bridle, carried 
out, and beheaded. Eight-and-twenty knights were hanged, drawn, 
and quartered. When the King had despatched this bloody work, 
and had made a fresh and a long truce with Bruce, he took the 
Despensers into greater favour than ever, and made the father Earl 
of Winchester, 

One prisoner, and an important one, who was taken at Borough- 
bridge, made his escape, however, and turned the tide against the 
King. This was Roger Mortimer, always resolutely opposed to 
him, who was sentenced to death, and placed for safe custody in the 
Tower of London. He treated his guards to a quantity of wine 
into which he had put a sleeping potion; and, when they were 
insensible, broke out of his dungeon, got into a kitchen, climbed up 
the chimney, let himself down from the roof of the building with a 
rope-ladder, passed the sentries, got down to the river, and made 
away in a boat to where servants and horses were waiting for him. 
He finally escaped to France, where Charles le Bel, the brother 
of the beautiful Queen, was King. Charles sought to quarrel with 
the King of England, on pretence of his not having come to do him 
homage at his coronation. It was proposed that the beautiful 
Queen should go over to arrange the dispute ; she went, and wrote 
home to the King, that as he was sick and could not come to France 
himself, perhaps it would be better to send over the young Prince, 
their son, who was only twelve years old, who could do homage to 
her brother in his stead, and in whose company she would immedi- 
ately return. The King sent him : but, both he and the Queen 
remained at the French Court, and Roger Mortimer became the 
Queen's lover. 

When the King wrote, again and again, to the Queen to come 
home, she did not reply that she despised him too much to live 
with him any more (which was the truth), but said she was afraid 
of the two Despensers. In short, her design was to overthrow the 
favourites' power, and the King's power, such as it was, and invade 
England. Having obtained a French force of two thousand men, 
and being joined by all the English exiles then in France, she landed, 
within a year, at Orewell, in Suffolk, where she was immediately 
joined by the Earls of Kent and Norfolk, the King's two brothers ; 
by other powerful noblemen ; and lastly, by the first English general 
who was despatched to check her : who went over to her with all his 
men. The people of London, receiving these tidings, would do noth- 
ing for the King, but broke open the Tower, let out all his prisoners, 
and threw up their caps and hurrahed for the beautiful Queen. 



454 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

The King, with his two favourites, fled to Bristol, where he left 
old Despenser in charge of the town and castle, while he went on 
with the son to Wales. The Bristol men being opposed to the 
King, and it being impossible to hold the town with enemies every- 
where within the walls, Despenser yielded it up on the third day, 
and was instantly brought to trial for having traitorously influenced 
what was called " the King's mind " — though I doubt if the King 
ever had any. He was a venerable old man, upwards of ninety years 
of age, but his age gained no respect or mercy. He was hanged, torn 
open while he was yet alive, cut up into pieces, and thrown to the 
dogs. His son was soon taken, tried at Hereford before the same 
judge on a long series of foolish charges, found guilty, and hanged 
upon a gallows fifty feet high, with a chaplet of nettles round his 
head. His poor old father and he were innocent enough of any worse 
crimes than the crime of having been friends of a King, on whom, 
as a mere man, they would never have deigned to cast a favourable 
look. It is a bad crime, I know, and leads to worse ; but, many 
lords and gentlemen — I even think some ladies, too, if I recollect 
right — have committed it in England, who have neither been given 
to the dogs, nor hanged up fifty feet high. 

The wretched King was running here and there, all this time, 
and never getting anywhere in particular, until he gave himself up, 
and was taken off to Kenilworth Castle. When he was safely 
lodged there, the Queen went to London and met the Parliament. 
And the Bishop of Hereford, who was the most skilful of her friends, 
said. What was to be done now ? Here was an imbecile, indolent, 
miserable King upon the throne ; wouldn't it be better to take 
him off", and put his son there instead ? I don't know whether the 
Queen really pitied him at this pass, but she began to cry ; so, the 
Bishop said. Well, my Lords and Gentlemen, what do you think, 
upon the whole, of sending down to Kenilworth, and seeing if His 
Majesty (God bless him, and forbid we should depose him !) won't 
resign ? 

My Lords and Gentlemen thought it a good notion, so a deputa- 
tion of them went down to Kenilworth ; and there the King came 
into the great hall of the Castle, commonly dressed in a poor black 
gown ; and when he saw a certain bishop among them, fell down, 
poor feeble-headed man, and made a wretched spectacle of himself. 
Somebody lifted him up, and then Sir William Trussel, the 
Speaker of the House of Commons, almost frightened him to death by 
making him a tremendous speech to the efl'ect that he was no longer a 
King, and that everybody renounced allegiance to him. After which, 
Sir Thomas Blount, the Steward of the Household, nearly fin- 
ished him, by coming forward and breaking his white wand — which 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 455 

was a ceremony only performed at a King's death. Being asked 
in this pressing manner what he thought of resigning, the King 
said he thought it was the best thing he could do. So, he did it, 
and they proclaimed his son next day. 

I wish I could close his history by saying that he lived a harm- 
less life in the Castle and the Castle gardens at Kenilworth, many 
years — that he had a favourite, and plenty to eat and drink — 
and, having that, wanted nothing. But he was shamefully humili- 
ated. He was outraged, and slighted, and had dirty water from 
ditches given him to shave with, and wept and said he would have 
clean warm water, and was altogether very miserable. He was moved 
from this castle to that castle, and from that castle to the other 
castle, because this lord or that lord, or the other lord, was too 
kind to him : until at last he came to Berkeley Castle, near the 
river Severn, where (the Lord Berkeley being then ill and absent) 
he fell into the hands of two black ruffians, called Thomas G-our- 
NAY and William Ogle. 

One night — ■ it was the night of September the twenty-first, one 
thousand three hundred and twenty- seven — dreadful screams were 
heard, by the startled people in the neighbouring town, ringing 
through the thick walls of the Castle, and the dark deep night ; 
and they said, as they were thus horribly awakened from their 
sleep, " May Heaven be merciful to the King ; for those cries for- 
bode that no good is being done to him in his dismal prison ! " 
Next morning he was dead — not bruised, or stabbed, or marked 
upon the body, but much distorted in the face ; and it was whis- 
pered afterwards, that those two villains, Gournay and Ogle, had 
burnt up his inside with a red-hot iron. 

If you ever come near Gloucester, and see the centre tower of its 
beautiful Cathedral, with its four rich pinnacles, rising lightly in 
the air ; you may remember that the wretched Edward the Second 
was buried in the old abbey of that ancient city, at forty-three years 
old, after being for nineteen years and a half a perfectly incapable 
King. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE THIRD. 

Roger Mortimer, the Queen's lover (who escaped to France in 
the last chapter), was far from profiting by the examples he had 
had of the fate of favourites. Having, through the Queen's in- 
fluence, come into possession of the estates of the two Despensers, 
he became extremely proud and ambitious, and sought to be the 



456 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

real ruler of England. The young King, who was crowned at four- 
teen years of age with all the usual solemnities, resolved not to bear 
this, and soon pursued Mortimer to his ruin. 

The people themselves were not fond of Mortimer — first, be- 
cause he was a Royal favourite ; secondly, because he was supposed 
to have helped to make a peace with Scotland which now took 
place, and in virtue of which the young King's sister Joan, only 
seven years old, was promised in marriage to David, the son and 
heir of Robert Bruce, who was only five years old. The nobles 
hated Mortimer because of his pride, riches, and power. They 
went so far as to take up arms against him ; but were obliged to 
submit. The Earl of Kent, one of those who did so, but who after- 
wards went over to Mortimer and the Queen, was made an example 
of in the following cruel manner : 

He seems to have been anything but a wise old earl ; and he 
was persuaded by the agents of the favourite and the Queen, that 
poor King Edward the Second was not really dead ; and thus was 
betrayed into writing letters favouring his rightful claim to the 
throne. This was made out to be high treason, and he was tried, 
found guilty, and sentenced to be executed. They took the poor 
old lord outside the town of Winchester, and there kept him wait- 
ing some three or four hours until they could find somebody to cut 
off his head. At last, a convict said he would do it, if the govern- 
ment would pardon him in return ; and they gave him the pardon ; 
and at one blow he put the Earl of Kent out of his last suspense. 

While the Queen was in France, she had found a lovely and good 
young lady, named Philippa, who she thought would make an ex- 
cellent wife for her son. The young King married this lady, soon 
after he came to the throne ; and her first child, Edward, Prince 
of Wales, afterwards became celebrated, as we shall presently see, 
under the famous title of Edward the Black Prince. 

The young King, thinking the time ripe for the downfall of 
Mortimer, took counsel with Lord Montacute how he should pro- 
ceed. A Parliament was going to be held at Nottingham, and 
that lord recommended that the favourite should be seized by night 
in Nottingham Castle, where he was sure to be. Now, this, like 
many other things, was more easily said than done ; because, to 
guard against treachery, the great gates of the Castle were locked 
every night, and the great keys were carried up-stairs to the Queen, 
who laid them under her own pillow. But the Castle had a gov- 
ernor, and the governor being Lord Montacute's friend, confided 
to him how he knew of a secret passage under-ground, hidden 
from observation by the weeds and brambles with which it was 
overgrown ; and how, through that passage, the conspirators might 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 457 

enter in the dead of the night, and go straight to Mortimer's room. 
Accordingly, upon a certain dark night, at midnight, they made 
their way through this dismal place : startling the rats, and fright- 
ening the owls and bats : and came safely to the bottom of the 
main tower of the Castle, where the King met them, and took 
them up a profoundly dark staircase in a deep silence. They soon 
heard the voice of Mortimer in council with some friends ; and 
bursting into the room with a sudden noise, took him prisoner. 
The Queen cried out from her bed-chamber, " Oh, my sweet son, 
my dear son, spare my gentle Mortimer ! " They carried him off, 
however ; and, before the next Parliament, accused him of having 
made differences between the young King and his mother, and of 
having brought about the death of the Earl of Kent, and even 
of the late King; for, as you know by this time, when they 
wanted to get rid of a man in those old days, they were not very 
particular of what they accused him, Mortimer was found guilty 
of all this, and was sentenced to be hanged at Tyburn. The 
King shut his mother up in genteel confinement, where she passed 
the rest of her life ; and now he became King in earnest. 

The first effort he made was to conquer Scotland, The English 
lords who had lands in Scotland, finding that their rights were 
not respected under the late peace, made war on their own account : 
choosing for their general, Edward, the son of John Baliol, who 
made such a vigorous fight, that in less than two months he won 
the whole Scottish Kingdom. He was joined, when thus tri- 
umphant, by the King and Parliament ; and he and the King in 
person besieged the Scottish forces in Berwick. The whole Scot- 
tish army coming to the assistance of their countrymen, such a 
furious battle ensued, that thirty thousand men are said to have 
been killed in it. Baliol was then crowned King of Scotland, 
doing homage to the King of England; but little came of his 
successes after all, for the Scottish men rose against him, within 
no very long time, and David Bruce came back within ten years 
and took his kingdom. 

France was a far richer country than Scotland, and the King 
had a much greater mind to conquer it. So, he let Scotland alone, 
and pretended that he had a claim to the French throne in right 
of his mother. He had, in reality, no claim at all; but that 
mattered little in those times. He brought over to his cause 
many little princes and sovereigns, and even courted the alliance 
of the people of Flanders — a busy, working community, who had 
very small respect for kings, and whose head man was a brewer. 
With such forces as he raised by these means, Edward invaded 
France ; but he did little by that, except run into debt in carrying 



458 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

on the war to the extent of three hundred thousand pounds. The 
next year he did better ; gaining a great sea-fight in the harbour 
of Sluys. This success, however, was very short-lived, for the 
Flemings took fright at the siege of Saint Omer and ran away, 
leaving their weapons and baggage behind them. Philip, the 
French King, coming up with his army, and Edward being very 
anxious to decide the war, proposed to settle the difference by single 
combat with him, or by a fight of one hundred knights on each 
side. The French King said, he thanked him; but being very 
well as he was, he would rather not. So, after some skirmishing 
and talking, a short peace was made. 

It was soon broken by King Edward's favouring the cause of 
John, Earl of Montford ; a French nobleman, who asserted a claim 
of his own against the French King, and offered to do homage to 
England for the Crown of France, if he could obtain it through 
England's help. This French lord, himself, was soon defeated by 
the French King's son, and shut up in a tower in Paris ; but his 
wife, a courageous and beautiful woman, who is said to have had 
the courage of a man, and the heart of a lion, assembled the people 
of Brittany, where she then was ; and, showing them her infant son, 
made many pathetic entreaties to them not to desert her and their 
young Lord. They took fire at this appeal, and rallied round her 
in the strong castle of Heunebon. Here she was not only besieged 
without by the French under Charles de Blois, but was endangered 
within by a dreary old bishop, who was always representing to the 
people what horrors they must undergo if they were faithful — 
first from famine, and afterwards from fire and sword. But this 
noble lady, whose heart never failed her, encouraged her soldiers 
by her own example ; went from post to post like a great general ; 
even mounted on horseback fully armed, and, issuing from the castle 
by a by-path, fell upon the French camp, set fire to the tents, and 
threw the whole force into disorder. This done, she got safely 
back to Hennebon again, and was received with loud shouts of joy 
by the defenders of the castle, who had given her up for lost. As 
they were now very short of provisions, however, and as they could 
not dine off enthusiasm, and as the old bishop was always saying, 
" I told you what it would come to ! " they began to lose heart, 
and to talk of yielding the castle up. The brave Countess retir- 
ing to an upper room and looking with great grief out to sea, 
where she expected relief from England, saw, at this very time, 
the English ships in the distance, and was relieved and rescued ! 
Sir Walter Manning, the English commander, so admired her 
courage, that, being come into the castle with the English knights, 
and having made a feast there, he assaulted the French by way 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 459 

of dessert, and beat them off triumphantly. Then he and the knights 
came back to the castle with great joy; and the Countess who 
had watched them from a high tower, thanked them with all her 
heart, and kissed them every one. 

This noble lady distinguished herself afterwards in a sea-fight 
with the French off Guernsey, when she was on her way to Eng- 
land to ask for more troops. Her great spirit roused another lady, 
the wife of another French lord (whom the French King very 
barbarously murdered), to distinguish herself scarcely less. The 
time was fast coming, however, when Edward, Prince of Wales, 
was to be the great star of this French and English war. 

It w^as in the month of July, in the year one thousand three 
hundred and forty-six, when the King embarked at Southampton 
for France, with an army of about thirty thousand men in all, at- 
tended by the Prince of Wales and by several of the chief nobles. 
He landed at La Hogue in Normandy ; and, burning and destroy- 
ing as he went, according to custom, advanced up the left bank of 
the river Seine, and fired the small towns even close to Paris; 
but, being w^atched from the right bank of the river by the French 
King and all his army, it came to this at last, that Edward found 
himself, on Saturday the twenty-sixth of August, one thousand 
three hundred and forty-six, on a rising ground behind the little 
French village of Crecy, face to face with the French King's force. 
And, although the French King had an enormous army — in num- 
ber more than eight times his — he there resolved to beat him or 
be beaten. 

The young Prince, assisted by the Earl of Oxford and the Earl 
of Warwick, led the first division of the English army ; two other 
great Earls led the second ; and the King, the third. When the 
morning dawned, the King received the sacrament, and heard pray- 
ers, and then, mounted on horseback with a white wand in his 
hand, rode from company to company, and rank to rank, cheering 
and encouraging both officers and men. Then the whole army 
breakfasted, each man sitting on the ground where he had stood ; 
and then they remained quietly on the ground with their weapons 
ready. 

Up came the French King with all his great force. It was 
dark and angry weather ; there was an eclipse of the sun; there 
was a thunder-storm, accompanied with tremendous rain; the 
frightened birds flew screaming above the soldiers' heads. A cer- 
tain captain in the French army advised the French King, who 
was by no means cheerful, not to begin the battle until the mor- 
row. The King, taking this advice, gave the word to halt. But, 
those behind not understanding it, or desiring to be foremost with 



460 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

the rest, came pressing on. The roads for a great distance were 
covered with this immense army, and with the common people 
from the villages, who were flourishing their rude weapons, and 
making a great noise. Owing to these circumstances, the French 
army advanced in the greatest confusion ; every French lord doing 
what he liked with his own men, and putting out the men of every 
other French lord. 

Now, their King relied strongly upon a great body of cross-bow- 
men from Genoa ; and these he ordered to the front to begin the 
battle, on finding that he could not stop it. They shouted once, 
they shouted twice, they shouted three times, to alarm the Eng- 
lish archers ; but, the English would have heard them shout three 
thousand times and would have never moved. At last the cross- 
bowmen went forward a little, and began to discharge their bolts ; 
upon which, the English let fly such a hail of arrows, that the 
Genoese speedily made off — for their cross-bows, besides being 
heavy to carry, required to be wound up with a handle, and conse- 
quently took time to re-load; the English, on the other hand, 
could discharge their arrows almost as fast as the arrows could fly. 

When the French King saw the Genoese turning, he cried out 
to his men to kill those scoundrels, who were doing harm instead 
of service. This increased the confusion. Meanwhile the English 
archers, continuing to shoot as fast as ever, shot down great num- 
bers of the French soldiers and knights ; whom certain sly Cornish- 
men and Welshmen, from the English army, creeping along the 
ground, despatched with great knives. 

The Prince and his division were at this time so hard-pressed, 
that the Earl of Warwick sent a message to the King, who was 
overlooking the battle from a windmill, beseeching him to send 
more aid. 

"Is my son killed?" said the King. 

"No, sire, please God," returned the messenger. 

"Is he wounded?" said the King. 

" No, sire." 

" Is he thrown to the ground ? " said the King. 

" No, sire, not so ; but, he is very hard-pressed." 

"Then," said the King, "go back to those who sent you, and 
tell them I shall send no aid ; because I set my heart upon my 
son proving himself this day a brave knight, and because I am 
resolved, please God, that the honour of a great victory shall be 
his ! " 

These bold words, being reported to the Prince and his division, 
so raised their spirits, that they fought better than ever. The 
King of France charged gallantly with his men many times ; but 



A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 461 

it was of no use. Night closing in, his horse was killed under him 
by an English arrow, and the knights and nobles who had clus- 
tered thick about him early in the day, were now completely scat- 
tered. At last, some of his few remaining followers led him off the 
field by force, since he would not retire of himself, and they jour- 
neyed away to Amiens. The victorious English, lighting their 
watch-fires, made merry on the field, and the King, riding to meet 
his gallant son, took him in his arms, kissed him, and told him 
that he had acted nobly, and proved himself worthy of the day and 
of the crown. While it was yet night, King Edward was hardly 
aware of the great victory he had gained ; but, next day, it was 
discovered that eleven princes, twelve hundred knights, and thirty 
thousand common men lay dead upon the French side. Among 
these was the King of Bohemia, an old blind man ; who, having 
been told that his son was wounded in the battle, and that no 
force could stand against the Black Prince, called to him two 
knights, put himself on horseback between them, fastened the 
three bridles together, and dashed in among the English, where he 
was presently slain. He bore as his crest three white ostrich 
feathers, with the motto Ich dien, signifying in English " I serve." 
This crest and motto were taken by the Prince of Wales in remem- 
brance of that famous day, and have been borne by the Prince of 
Wales ever since. 

Five days after this great battle, the King laid siege to Calais. 
This siege — ever afterwards memorable — lasted nearly a year. 
In order to starve the inhabitants out. King Edward built so many 
wooden houses for the lodgings of his troops, that it is said their 
quarters looked like a second Calais suddenly sprung up around 
the first. Early in the siege, the governor of the town drove out 
what he called the useless mouths, to the number of seventeen 
hundred persons, men and women, young and old. King Edward 
allowed them to pass through his lines, and even fed them, and 
dismissed them with money ; but, later in the siege, he was not so 
merciful — five hundred more, who were afterwards driven out, 
dying of starvation and misery. The garrison were so hard-pressed 
at last, that they sent a letter to King Philip, telling him that 
they had eaten all the horses, all the dogs, and all the rats and 
mice that could be found in the place ; and, that if he did not re- 
lieve them, they must either surrender to the English, or eat one 
another. Philip made one effort to give them relief; but they 
were so hemmed in by the English power, that he could not suc- 
ceed, and was fain to leave the place. Upon this they hoisted the 
English flag, and surrendered to King Edward. " Tell your gen- 
eral," said he to the humble messengers who came out of the town, 



462 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

" that I require to have sent here, six of the most distinguished 
citizens, bare-legged, and in their shirts, with ropes about their 
necks ; and let those six men bring with them the keys of the 
castle and the town." 

When the Governor of Calais related this to the people in the 
Market-place, there was great weeping and distress ; in the midst 
of which, one worthy citizen, named Eustace de Saint Pierre, rose 
up and said, that if the six men required were not sacrificed, the 
whole population would be; therefore, he offered himself as the 
first. Encouraged by this bright example, five other worthy citi- 
zens rose up one after another, and offered themselves to save the 
rest. The Governor, who was too badly wounded to be able to 
walk, mounted a poor old horse that had not been eaten, and con- 
ducted these good men to the gate, while all the people cried and 
mourned. 

Edward received them wrathfully, and ordered the heads of the 
whole six to be struck off. However, the good Queen feU upon 
her knees, and besought the King to give them up to her. The 
King replied, " I wish you had been somewhere else ; but I cannot 
refuse you." So she had them properly dressed, made a feast for 
them, and sent them back with a handsome present, to the great 
rejoicing of the whole camp. I hope the people of Calais loved 
the daughter to whom she gave birth soon afterwards, for her 
gentle mother's sake. 

Now came that terrible disease, the Plague, into Europe, hurry- 
ing from the heart of China; and killed the wretched people — 
especially the poor — in such enormous numbers, that one-half of 
the inhabitants of England are related to have died of it. It 
killed the cattle, in great numbers, too ; and so few working men 
remained alive, that there were not enough left to till the ground. 

After eight years of differing and quarrelling, the Prince of 
Wales again invaded France with an army of sixty thousand men. 
He went through the south of the country, burning and plunder- 
ing wheresoever he went ; while his father, who had still the Scot- 
tish war upon his hands, did the like in Scotland, but was harassed 
and worried in his retreat from that country by the Scottish men, 
who repaid his cruelties with interest. 

The French King, Philip, was now dead, and was succeeded by 
his son John. The Black Prince, called by that name from the 
colour of the armour he wore to set off his fair complexion, continuing 
to burn and destroy in France, roused John into determined oppo- 
sition ; and so cruel had the Black Prince been in his campaign, 
and so severely had the French peasants suffered, that he could not 
find one who, for love, or money, or the fear of death, would tell 




THE INTERCESSION OF QUEEN PHILIPPA FOR THE CITIZENS OF CALAIS, 



464 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

him what the French King was doing, or where he was. Thus it 
happened that he came upon the French King's forces, all of a sudden, 
near the town of Poitiers, and found that the whole neighbouring 
country was occupied by a vast French army. " God help us ! " 
said the Black Prince, "we must make the best of it." 

So, on a Sunday morning, the eighteenth of September, the 
Prince — whose army was now reduced to ten thousand men in all 
— prepared to give battle to the French King, who had sixty thou- 
sand horse alone. While he was so engaged, there came riding 
from the French camp, a Cardinal, who had persuaded John to let 
him offer terms, and try to save the shedding of Christian blood. 
"Save my honour," said the Prince to this good priest, "and save 
the honour of my army, and I will make any reasonable terms." 
He offered to give up all the towns, castles, and prisoners, he had 
taken, and to swear to make no war in France for seven years ; 
but, as John would hear of nothing but his surrender, with a hun- 
dred of his chief knights, the treaty was broken off, and the Prince 
said quietly — " God defend the right ; we shall fight to-morrow." 

Therefore, on the Monday morning, at break of day, the two 
armies prepared for battle. The English were posted in a strong 
place, which could only be approached by one narrow lane, skirted 
by hedges on both sides. The French attacked them by this lane ; 
but were so galled and slain by English arrows from behind the 
hedges, that they were forced to retreat. Then went six hundred 
English bowmen round about, and, coming upon the rear of the 
French army, rained arrows on them thick and fast. The French 
knights, thrown into confusion, quitted their banners and dispersed 
in all directions. Said Sir John Chandos to the Prince, " Ride for- 
ward, noble Prince, and the day is yours. The King of France is 
so valiant a gentleman, that I know he will never fly, and may be 
taken prisoner." Said the Prince to this, "Advance, English ban- 
ners, in the name of God and Saint George ! " and on they pressed 
until they came up with the French King, fighting fiercely with 
his battle-axe, and, when all his nobles had forsaken him, attended 
faithfully to the last by his youngest son Philip, only sixteen years 
of age. Father and son fought well, and the King had already two 
wounds in his face, and had been beaten down, when he at last de- 
livered himself to a banished French knight, and gave him his 
right-hand glove in token that he had done so. 

The Black Prince was generous as well as brave, and he invited 
his royal prisoner to supper in his tent, and waited upon him at 
table, and, when they afterwards rode into London in a gorgeous 
procession, mounted the French King on a fine cream-coloured 
horse, and rode at his side on a little pony. This was all very 



I 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 465 

kind, but I think it was, perhaps, a little theatrical too, and has 
been made more meritorious than it deserved to be ; especially as I 
am inclined to think that the greatest kindness to the King of 
France would have been not to have shown him to the people at 
all. However, it must be said, for these acts of politeness, that, 
in course of time, they did much to soften the horrors of war and 
the passions of conquerors. It was a long, long time before the 
common soldiers began to have the benefit of such courtly deeds ; 
but they did at last ; and thus it is possible that a poor soldier 
who asked for quarter at the battle of Waterloo, or any other such 
great fight, may have owed his life indirectly to Edward the Black 
Prince. 

At this time there stood in the Strand, in London, a palace 
called the Savoy, which was given up to the captive King of France 
and his son for their residence. As the King of Scotland had now 
been King Edward's captive for eleven years too, his success was, 
at this time, tolerably complete. The Scottish business was settled 
by the prisoner being released under the title of Sir David, King of 
Scotland, and by his engaging to pay a large ransom. The state 
of France encouraged England to propose harder terms to that 
country, where the people rose against the unspeakable cruelty and 
barbarity of its nobles ; where the nobles rose in turn against the 
people ; where the most frightful outrages were committed on all 
sides ; and where the insurrection of the peasants, called the insur- 
rection of the Jacquerie, from Jacques, a common Christian name 
among the country people of France, awakened terrors and hatreds 
that have scarcely yet passed away. A treaty called the Great 
Peace, was at last signed, under which King Edward agreed to give 
up the greater part of his conquests, and King John to pay, within 
six years, a ransom of three million crowns of gold. He was so 
beset by his own nobles and courtiers for having yielded to these 
conditions — though they could help him to no better — that he 
came back of his own will to his old palace-prison of the Savoy, 
and there died. 

There was a Sovereign of Castile at that time, called Pedro the 
Cruel, who deserved the name remarkably well: having com- 
mitted, among other cruelties, a variety of murders. This amiable 
monarch, being driven from his throne for his crimes, went to the 
province of Bordeaux, where the Black Prince — now married to 
his cousin Joan, a pretty widow — was residing, and besought his 
help. The Prince, who took to him much more kindly than a 
prince of such fame ought to have taken to such a ruffian, readily 
listened to his fair promises, and agreeing to help him, sent secret 
orders to some troublesome disbanded soldiers of his and his father's, 
2h 



466 A CmLD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

who called themselves the Free Companions, and who had been a 
pest to the French people, for some time, to aid this Pedro. The 
Prince, himself, going into Spain to head the army of relief, soon 
set Pedro on his throne again — where he no sooner found himself, 
than, of course, he behaved like the villain he was, broke his word 
without the least shame, and abandoned all the promises he had 
made to the Black Prince. 

Now, it had cost the Prince a good deal of money to pay soldiers 
to support this murderous King ; and finding himself, when he 
came back disgusted to Bordeaux, not only in bad health, but 
deeply in debt, he began to tax his French subjects to pay his 
creditors. They appealed to the French King, Charles ; war again 
broke out ; and the French town of Limoges, which the Prince had 
greatly benefited, went over to the French King. Upon this he 
ravaged the province of which it was the capital ; burnt, and plun- 
dered, and killed in the old sickening way ; and refused mercy to 
the prisoners, men, women, and children taken in the offending 
town, though he was so ill and so much in need of pity himself 
from Heaven, that he was carried in a litter. He lived to come 
home and make himself popular with the people and Parliament, 
and he died on Trinity Sunday, the eighth of June, one thousand 
three hundred and seventy-six, at forty-six years old. 

The whole nation mourned for him as one of the most renowned 
and beloved princes it had ever had ; and he was buried with great 
lamentations in Canterbury Cathedral. Near to the tomb of Ed- 
ward the Confessor, his monument, with his figure, carved in stone, 
and represented in the old black armour, lying on its back, may be 
seen at this day, with an ancient coat of mail, a helmet, and a pair 
of gauntlets hanging from a beam above it, which most people like 
to believe were once worn by the Black Prince. 

King Edward did not outlive his renowned son, long. He was 
old, and one Alice Perrers, a beautiful lady, had contrived to make 
him so fond of her in his old age, that he could refuse her nothing, 
and made himself ridiculous. She little deserved his love, or — what 
I dare say she valued a great deal more — the jewels of the late 
Queen, which he gave her among other rich presents. She took 
the very ring from his finger on the morning of the day when he 
died, and left him to be pillaged by his faithless servants. Only 
one good priest was true to him, and attended him to the last. 

Besides being famous for the great victories I have related, the 
reign of King Edward the Third was rendered memorable in better 
ways, by the growth of architecture and the erection of Windsor 
Castle. In better ways still, by the rising up of Wickliffe, orig- 
inally a poor parish priest : who devoted himself to exposing, with 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 467 

wonderful power and success, the ambition and corruption of the 
Pope, and of the whole church of which he was the head. 

Some of those Flemings were induced to come to England in this 
reign too, and to settle in Norfolk, where they made better woollen 
cloths than the English had ever had before. The Order of the Gar- 
ter (a very jRne thing in its way, but hardly so important as good 
clothes for the nation) also dates from this period. The King is 
said to have picked up a lady's garter at a ball, and to have said, 
Honi soit qui mal y pense — in English, " Evil be to him who 
evil thinks of it." The courtiers were usually glad to imitate what 
the King said or did, and hence from a slight incident the Order of 
the Garter was instituted, and became a great dignity. So the 
story goes. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

ENGLAND UNDER KICHAED THE SECOND. 

Richard, son of the Black Prince, a boy eleven years of age, 
succeeded to the Crown under the title of King Richard the Second. 
The whole English nation were ready to admire him for the sake 
of his brave father. As to the lords and ladies about the Court, 
they declared him to be the most beautiful, the wisest, and the best 
— even of princes — whom the lords and ladies about the Court 
generally declare to be the most beautiful, the wisest, and the best 
of mankind. To flatter a poor boy in this base manner was not a 
very likely way to develop whatever good was in him; and it brought 
him to anything but a good or happy end. 

The Duke of Lancaster, the young King's uncle — commonly 
called John of Gaunt, from having been born at Ghent, which 
the common people so pronounced — was supposed to have some 
thoughts of the throne himself; but, as he was not popular, and 
the memory of the Black Prince was, he submitted to his nephew. 

The war with France being still unsettled, the Government of 
England wanted money to provide for the expenses that might 
arise out of it ; accordingly a certain tax, called the Poll-tax, which 
had originated in the last reign, was ordered to be levied on the 
people. This was a tax on every person in the kingdom, male and 
female, above the age of fourteen, of three groats (or three four- 
penny pieces) a year ; clergymen were charged more, and only beg- 
gars were exempt. 

I have no need to repeat that the common people of England 
had long been suffering under great oppression. They were still 



468 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

the mere slaves of the lords of the land on which they lived, and 
were on most occasions harshly and unjustly treated. But, they 
had begun by this time to think very seriously of not bearing quite 
so much ; and, probably, were emboldened by that French insurrec- 
tion I mentioned in the last chapter. 

The people of Essex rose against the Poll-tax, and being severely 
handled by the government officers, killed some of them. At this 
very time one of the tax-collectors, going his rounds from house to 
house, at Dartford in Kent came to the cottage of one Wat, a tiler 
by trade, and claimed the tax upon his daughter. Her mother, 
who was at home, declared that she was under the age of fourteen ; 
upon that, the collector (as other collectors had already done in 
different parts of England) behaved in a savage way, and brutally 
insulted Wat Tyler's daughter. The daughter screamed, the mother 
screamed. Wat the Tiler, who was at w^ork not far off, ran to the 
spot, and did what any honest father under such provocation might 
have done — struck the collector dead at a blow. 

Instantly the people of that town uprose as one man. They 
made Wat Tyler their leader ; they joined with the people of Essex, 
who were in arms under a priest called Jack Straw ; they took 
out of prison another priest named John Ball ; and gathering in 
numbers as they went along, advanced, in a great confused army of 
poor men, to Blackheath. It is said that they wanted to abolish 
all property, and to declare all men equal. I do not think this 
very likely ; because they stopped the travellers on the roads and 
made them swear to be true to King Kichard and the people. Nor 
were they at all disposed to injure those who had done them no 
harm, merely because they were of high station ; for, the King's 
mother, who had to pass through their camp at Blackheath, on her 
way to her young son, lying for safety in the Tower of London, 
had merely to kiss a few dirty-faced rough-bearded men who were 
noisily fond of royalty, and so got away in perfect safety. Next 
day the whole mass marched on to London Bridge. 

There was a drawbridge in the middle, which William Wal- 
worth the Mayor caused to be raised to prevent their coming into 
the city ; but they soon terrified the citizens into lowering it again, 
and spread themselves, with great uproar, over the streets. They 
broke open the prisons ; they burned the papers in Lambeth Palace ; 
they destroyed the Duke of Lancaster's Palace, the Savoy, in 
the Strand, said to be the most beautiful and splendid in England ; 
they set fire to the books and documents in the Temple ; and made 
a great riot. Many of these outrages were committed in drunken- 
ness ; since those citizens, who had well-filled cellars, were only too 
glad to throw them open to save the rest of their property ; but 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 469 

even the drunken rioters were very careful to steal nothing. They 
were so angry with one man, who was seen to take a silver cup at 
the Savoy Palace, and put it in his breast, that they drowned him 
in the river, cup and all. 

The young King had been taken out to treat with them before 
they committed these excesses ; but, he and the people about him 
were so frightened by the riotous shouts, that they got back to 
the Tower in the best way they could. This made the insurgents 
bolder ; so they went on rioting away, striking off the heads of 
those who did not, at a moment's notice, declare for King Richard 
and the people ; and killing as many of the unpopular persons 
whom they supposed to be their enemies as they could by any 
means lay hold of. In this manner they passed one very violent 
day, and then proclamation was made that the King would meet 
them at Mile-end, and grant their requests. 

The rioters went to Mile-end to the number of sixty thousand, 
and the King met them there, and to the King the rioters peace- 
ably proposed four conditions. First, that neither they, nor their 
children, nor any coming after them, should be made slaves any 
more. Secondly, that the rent of land should be fixed at a certain 
price in money, instead of being paid in service. Thirdly, that they 
should have liberty to buy and sell in all markets and public places, 
like other free men. Fourthly, that they should be pardoned for 
past offences. Heaven knows, there was nothing very unreason- 
able in these proposals ! The young King deceitfully pretended to 
think so, and kept thirty clerks up, all night, writing out a charter 
accordingly. 

Now, Wat Tyler himself wanted more than this. He wanted the 
entire abolition of the forest laws. He was not at Mile-end with 
the rest, but, while that meeting was being held, broke into the 
Tower of London and slew the archbishop and the treasurer, for 
whose heads the people had cried out loudly the day before. He 
and his men even thrust their swords into the bed of the Princess 
of Wales while the Princess was in it, to make certain that none of 
their enemies were concealed there. 

So, Wat and his men still continued armed, and rode about the 
city. Next morning, the King with a small train of some sixty 
gentlemen — among whom was Walworth the Mayor — rode into 
Smithfield, and saw Wat and his people at a little distance. Says 
Wat to his men, " There is the King. I will go speak with him, 
and tell him what we want." 

Straightway Wat rode up to him, and began to talk. " King," 
says Wat, " dost thou see all my men there 1 " 

" Ah," says the King. " Why 1 " 



470 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

" Because," says Wat, "they are all at my command, and have 
sworn to do whatever I bid them." 

Some declared afterwards that as Wat said this, he laid his hand 
on the King's bridle. Others declared that he was seen to play 
with his own dagger. I think, myself, that he just spoke to the 
King like a rough, angry man as he was, and did nothing more. 
At any rate he was expecting no attack, and preparing for no resist- 
ance, when AValworth the Mayor did the not very valiant deed of 
drawing a short sword and stabbing him in the throat. He dropped 
from his horse, and one of the King's people speedily finished him. 
So fell Wat Tyler. Fawners and flatterers made a mighty tri- 
umph of it, and set up a cry which will occasionally find an echo 
to this day. But Wat was a hard-working man, who had suffered 
much, and had been foully outraged ; and it is probable that he was 
a man of a much higher nature and a much braver spirit than any 
of the parasites who exulted then, or have exulted since, over his 
defeat. 

Seeing Wat down, his men immediately bent their bows to 
avenge his fall. If the young King had not had presence of mind 
at that dangerous moment, both he and the Mayor to boot might 
have followed Tyler pretty fast. But the King riding up to the 
crowd, cried out that Tyler was a traitor, and that he would be 
their leader. They were so taken by surprise, that they set up a 
great shouting, and followed the boy until he was met at Islington 
by a large body of soldiers. 

The end of this rising was the then usual end. As soon as the 
King found himself safe, he unsaid all he had said, and undid all 
he had done ; some fifteen hundred of the rioters were tried (mostly 
in Essex) with great rigour, and executed with great cruelty. Many 
of them were hanged on gibbets, and left there as a terror to the 
country people ; and, because their miserable friends took some of 
the bodies down to bury, the King ordered the rest to be chained 
up — which was the beginning of the barbarous custom of hanging 
in chains. The King's falsehood in this business makes such a 
pitiful figure, that I think Wat Tyler appears in history as beyond 
comparison the truer and more respectable man of the two. 

Richard was now sixteen years of age, and married Anne of 
Bohemia, an excellent princess, who was called " the good Queen 
Anne." She deserved a better husband ; for the King had been 
fawned and flattered into a treacherous, wasteful, dissolute, bad 
young man. 

There were two Popes at this time (as if one were not enough !), 
and their quarrels involved Europe in a great deal of trouble. 
Scotland was still troublesome too ; and at home there was much 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 471 

jealousy and distrust, and plotting and counter-plotting, because 
the King feared the ambition of his relations, and particularly of his 
uncle, the Duke of Lancaster, and the duke had his party against 
the King, and the King had his party against the duke. Nor were 
these home troubles lessened when the duke went to Castile to urge 
his claim to the crown of that kingdom ; for then the Duke of 
Gloucester, another of Richard's uncles, opposed him, and influenced 
the Parliament to demand the dismissal of the King's favourite 
ministers. The King said in reply, that he would not for such 
men dismiss the meanest servant in his kitchen. But, it had be- 
gun to signify little what a King said when a Parliament was de- 
termined ; so Richard was at last obliged to give way, and to agree 
to another Government of the kingdom, under a commission of four- 
teen nobles, for a year. His uncle of Gloucester was at the head of 
this commission, and, in fact, appointed everybody composing it. 

Having done all this, the King declared as soon as he saw an oppor- 
tunity that he had never meant to do it, and that it was all illegal ; 
and he got the judges secretly to sign a declaration to that effect. 
The secret oozed out directly, and was carried to the Duke of 
Gloucester. The Duke of Gloucester, at the head of forty thou- 
sand men, met the King on his entering into London to enforce his 
authority ; the King was helpless against him ; his favourites and 
ministers were impeached and were mercilessly executed. Among 
them were two men whom the people regarded with very different 
feelings ; one, Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice, who was hated for 
having made what was called " the bloody circuit " to try the riot- 
ers ; the other. Sir Simon Burley, an honourable knight, who had 
been the dear friend of the Black Prince, and the governor and 
guardian of the King. For this gentleman's life the good Queen 
even begged of Gloucester on her knees ; but Gloucester (with or 
without reason) feared and hated him, and rephed, that if she val- 
ued her husband's crown, she had better beg no more. All this 
was done under what was called by some the wonderful — and 
by others, with better reason, the merciless — Parliament. 

But Gloucester's power was not to last for ever. He held it for 
only a year longer ; in which year the famous battle of Otterbourne, 
sung in the old ballad of Chevy Chase, was fought. When the 
year was out, the King, turning suddenly to Gloucester, in the 
midst of a great council said, "Uncle, how old am I?" "Your 
highness," returned the duke, "is in your twenty-second year." 
"Am I so much?" said the King, "then I will manage my own 
affairs ! I am much obliged to you, my good lords, for your past 
services, but I need them no more." He followed this up, by 
appointing a new Chancellor and a new Treasurer, and announced 



472 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

to the people that he had resumed the Government. He held it 
for eight years without opposition. Through all that time, he kept 
his determination to revenge himself some day upon his uncle 
Gloucester, in his own breast. 

At last the good Queen died, and then the King, desiring to take 
a second wife, proposed to his council that he should marry Isabella, 
of France, the daughter of Charles the Sixth : who, the French 
courtiers said (as the English courtiers had said of Richard), was a 
marvel of beauty and wit, and quite a phenomenon — of seven years 
old. The council were divided about this marriage, but it took 
place. It secured peace between England and France for a quarter 
of a century ; but it was strongly opposed to the prejudices of the 
English people. The Duke of Gloucester, who was anxious to take 
the occasion of making himself popular, declaimed against it loudly, 
and this at length decided the King to execute the vengeance he had 
been nursing so long. 

He went with a gay company to the Duke of Gloucester's house, 
Pleshey Castle, in Essex, where the duke, suspecting nothing, came 
out into the courtyard to receive his royal visitor. While the King 
conversed in a friendly manner with the duchess, the duke was 
quietly seized, hurried away, shipped for Calais, and lodged in the 
castle there. His friends, the Earls of Arundel and Warwick, were 
taken in the same treacherous manner, and confined to their castles. 
A few days after, at Nottingham, they were impeached of high 
treason. The Earl of Arundel was condemned and beheaded, and 
the Earl of Warwick was banished. Then, a writ was sent by a 
messenger to the Governor of Calais, requiring him to send the 
Duke of Gloucester over to be tried. In three days he returned an 
answer that he could not do that, because the Duke of Gloucester 
had died in prison. The duke was declared a traitor, his property 
was confiscated to the King, a real or pretended confession he had 
made in prison to one of the Justices of the Common Pleas was 
produced against him, and there was an end of the matter. How 
the unfortunate duke died, very few cared to know. Whether he 
really died naturally; whether he killed himself; whether, by the 
King's order, he was strangled, or smothered between two beds (as 
a serving-man of the Governor's named Hall, did afterwards declare), 
cannot be discovered. There is not much doubt that he was killed, 
somehow or other, by his nephew's orders. Among the most active 
nobles in these proceedings were the King's cousin, Henry Boling- 
broke, whom the King had made Duke of Hereford to smooth 
down the old family quarrels, and some others : who had in the 
family-plotting times done just such acts themselves as they now 
condemned in the duke. They seem to have been a corrupt 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLA^'D. 473 

set of men ; but such men were easily found about the court in 
such days. 

The people murmured at all this, and were still very sore about 
the French marriage. The nobles saw how little the King cared 
for law, and how crafty he was, and began to be somewhat afraid 
of themselves. The King's life was a life of continued feasting and 
excess ; his retinue, down to the meanest servants, were dressed in 
the most costly manner, and caroused at his tables, it is related, to 
the number of ten thousand persons every day. He himself, sur- 
rounded by a body of ten thousand archers, and enriched by a duty 
on wool which the Commons had granted him for life, saw no dan- 
ger of ever being otherwise than powerful and absolute, and was 
as fierce and haughty as a King could be. 

He had two of his old enemies left, in the persons of the Dukes 
of Hereford and Norfolk. Sparing these no more than the others, he 
tampered with the Duke of Hereford until he got him to declare 
before the Council that the Duke of Norfolk had lately held some 
treasonable talk with him, as he was riding near Brentford ; and 
that he had told him, among other things, that he could not believe 
the King's oath — which nobody could, I should think. For this 
treachery he obtained a pardon, and the Duke of ISTorfolk was sum- 
moned to appear and defend himself As he denied the charge and 
said his accuser was a liar and a traitor, both noblemen, according 
to the manner of those times, were held in custody, and the truth 
was ordered to be decided by wager of battle at Coventry. This 
wager of battle meant that whosoever won the combat was to be 
considered in the right ; which nonsense meant in effect, that no 
strong man could ever be wrong. A great holiday was made ; a 
great crowd assembled, with much parade and show ; and the two 
combatants were about to rush at each other with their lances, 
when the King, sitting in a pavilion to see fair, threw down the 
truncheon he carried in his hand, and forbade the battle. The 
Duke of Hereford was to be banished for ten years, and the Duke 
of Norfolk was to be banished for life. So said the King. The 
Duke of Hereford went to France, and went no farther. The Duke 
of Norfolk made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and afterwards 
died at Venice of a broken heart. 

Faster and fiercer, after this, the King went on in his career. 
The Duke of Lancaster, who was the father of the Duke of Here- 
ford, died soon after the departure of his son ; and, the King, 
although he had solemnly granted to that son leave to inherit his 
father's property, if it should come to him during his banishment, 
immediately seized it all, like a robber. The judges were so afraid 
of him, that they disgraced themselves by declaring this theft to be 



474 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

just and lawful. His avarice knew no bounds. He outlawed seven- 
teen counties at once, on a frivolous pretence, merely to raise money 
by way of fines for misconduct. In short, he did as many dishonest 
things as he could ; and cared so little for the discontent of his sub- 
jects — though even the spaniel favourites began to whisper to him 
that there was such a thing as discontent afloat — that he took that 
time, of all others, for leaving England and making an expedition 
against the Irish. 

He was scarcely gone, leaving the Duke of York Eegent in his 
absence, when his cousin, Henry of Hereford, came over from France 
to claim the rights of which he had been so monstrously deprived. 
He was immediately joined by the two great Earls of Northumber- 
land and Westmoreland; and his uncle, the Regent, finding the 
King's cause unpopular, and the disinclination of the army to act 
against Henry, very strong, withdrew with the royal forces towards 
Bristol. Henry, at the head of an army, came from Yorkshire 
(where he had landed) to London and followed him. They joined 
their forces — how they brought that about, is not distinctly under- 
stood — and proceeded to Bristol Castle, whither three noblemen 
had taken the young Queen. The castle surrendering, they presently 
put those three noblemen to death. The Regent then remained 
there, and Henry went on to Chester. 

All this time, the boisterous weather had prevented the King 
from receiving intelligence of what had occurred. At length it was 
conveyed to him in Ireland, and he sent over the Earl of Salis- 
bury, who, landing at Conway, rallied the Welshmen, and waited 
for the King a whole fortnight ; at the end of that time the Welsh- 
men, who were perhaps not very warm for him in the beginning, 
quite cooled down and went home. When the King did land on 
the coast at last, he came with a pretty good power, but his men 
cared nothing for him, and quickly deserted. Supposing the Welsh- 
men to be still at Conway, he disguised himself as a priest, and 
made for that place in company with his two brothers and some 
few of their adherents. But, there were no Welshmen left — only 
Salisbury and a hundred soldiers. In this distress, the King's two 
brothers, Exeter and Surrey, offered to go to Henry to learn what 
his intentions were. Surrey, who was true to Richard, was put 
into prison. Exeter, who was false, took the royal badge, which 
was a hart, off" his shield, and assumed the rose, the badge of Henry. 
After this, it was pretty plain to the King what Henry's intentions 
were, without sending any more messengers to ask. 

The fallen King, thus deserted — hemmed in on all sides, and 
pressed with hunger — rode here and rode there, and went to this 
castle, and went to that castle, endeavouring to obtain some provi- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 475 

sions, but could find none. He rode wretchedly back to Conway, 
and there surrendered himself to the Earl of Northumberland, who 
came from Henry, in reality to take him prisoner, but in appearance 
to offer terms ; and whose men were hidden not far off. By this 
earl he was conducted to the castle of Flint, where his cousin Henry 
met him, and dropped on his knee as if he were still respectful to 
his sovereign. 

" Fair cousin of Lancaster," said the King, " you are very wel- 
come " (very welcome, no doubt ; but he would have been more so, 
in chains or without a head). 

"My lord," replied Henry, "I am come a little before my time; 
but, "vvith your good pleasure, I will show you the reason. Your 
people complain with some bitterness, that you have ruled them 
rigorously for two-and-twenty years. Now, if it please God, I will 
help you to govern them better in future." 

" Fair cousin," replied the abject King, "since it pleaseth you, it 
pleaseth me mightily." 

After this, the trumpets sounded, and the King was stuck on 
a wretched horse, and carried prisoner to Chester, where he was 
made to issue a proclamation, calling a Parliament. From Chester 
he was taken on towards London. At Lichfield he tried to escape 
by getting out of a window and letting himself down into a garden ; 
it was all in vain, however, and he was carried on and shut up in 
the Tower, where no one pitied him, and where the whole people, 
whose patience he had quite tired out, reproached him without 
mercy. Before he got there, it is related, that his very dog left 
him and departed from his side to lick the hand of Henry. 

The day before the Parliament met, a deputation went to this 
wrecked King, and told him that he had promised the Earl of 
Northumberland at Conway Castle to resign the crown. He said 
he was quite ready to do it, and signed a paper in which he renounced 
his authority and absolved his people from their allegiance to him. 
He had so little spirit left that he gave his royal ring to his tri- 
umphant cousin Henry with his own hand, and said, that if he could 
have had leave to appoint a successor, that same Henry was the 
man of all others whom he would have named. Next day, the 
Parliament assembled in Westminster Hall, where Henry sat at 
the side of the throne, which was empty and covered with a cloth of 
gold. The paper just signed by the King was read to the multitude 
amid shouts of joy, which were echoed through all the streets ; 
when some of the noise had died away, the King was formally de- 
posed. Then Henry arose, and, making the sign of the cross on his 
forehead and breast, challenged the realm of England as his right ; 
the archbishops of Canterbury and York seated him on the throne. 



476 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

The multitude shouted again, and the shouts re-echoed through- 
out all the streets. No one remembered, now, that Richard the Sec- 
ond had ever been the most beautiful, the wisest, and the best of 
princes ; and he now made living (to my thinking) a far more sorry- 
spectacle in the Tower of London, than Wat Tyler had made, lying 
dead, among the hoofs of the royal horses in Smithfield. 

The Poll-tax died with Wat. The Smiths to the King and 
Royal Family, could make no chains in which the King could hang 
the people's recollection of him ; so the Poll-tax was never collected. 



CHAPTER XX. 

ENGLAND UNDER HENRY THE FOURTH, CALLED BOLINGBROKE. 

During the last reign, the preaching of Wickliflfe against the 
pride and cunning of the Pope and all his men, had made a great 
noise in England. Whether the new King wished to be in favour 
with the priests, or whether he hoped, by pretending to be very 
religious, to cheat Heaven itself into the belief that he was not an 
usurper, I don't know. Both suppositions are likely enough. It 
is certain that he began his reign by making a strong show against 
the followers of Wickliffe, who were called Lollards, or heretics — 
although his father, John of Gaunt, had been of that way of think- 
ing, as he himself had been more than suspected of being. It is 
no less certain that he first established in England the detestable 
and atrocious custom, brought from abroad, of burning those peo- 
ple as a punishment for their opinions. It was the importation 
into England of one of the practices of what was called the Holy 
Inquisition : which was the most unholy and the most infamous 
tribunal that ever disgraced mankind, and made men more like 
demons than followers of Our Saviour. 

No real right to the crown, as you know, was in this King. 
Edward Mortimer, the young Earl of March — who was only eight 
or nine years old, and who was descended from the Duke of Clarence, 
the elder brother of Henry's father — was, by succession, the real 
heir to the throne. However, the King got his son declared Prince 
of Wales ; and, obtaining possession of the young Earl of March 
and his little brother, kept them in confinement (but not severely) 
in Windsor Castle. He then required the Parliament to decide 
what was to be done with the deposed King, who was quiet enough, 
and who only said that he hoped his cousin Henry would be "a 
good lord " to him. The Parliament replied that they would rec- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 477 

ommend his being kept in some secret place where the people could 
not resort, and where his friends could not be admitted to see him. 
Henry accordingly passed this sentence upon him, and it now began 
to be pretty clear to the nation that Richard the Second would not 
live very long. 

It was a noisy Parliament, as it was an unprincipled one, and 
the Lords quarrelled so violently among themselves as to which of 
them had been loyal and which disloyal, and which consistent and 
which inconsistent, that forty gauntlets are said to have been thrown 
upon the floor at one time as challenges to as many battles : the 
truth being that they were all false and base together, and had 
been, at one time with the old King, and at another time with the 
new one, and seldom true for any length of time to any one. They 
soon began to plot again. A conspiracy was formed to invite the 
King to a tournament at Oxford, and then to take him by surprise 
and kill him. This murderous enterprise, which was agreed upon 
at secret meetings in the house of the Abbot of Westminster, was 
betrayed by the Earl of Rutland — one of the conspirators. The 
King, instead of going to the tournament or staying at Windsor 
(where the conspirators suddenly went, on finding themselves dis- 
covered, with the hope of seizing him), retired to London, pro- 
claimed them all traitors, and advanced upon them with a great 
force. They retired into the west of England, proclaiming Richard 
King ; but, the people rose against them, and they were all slain. 
Their treason hastened the death of the deposed monarch. Whether 
he was killed by hired assassins, or whether he was starved to death, 
or whether he refused food on hearing of his brothers being killed 
(who were in that plot), is very doubtful. He met his death some- 
how ; and his body was publicly shown at Saint Paul's Cathedral 
with only the lower part of the face uncovered. I can scarcely 
doubt that he was killed by the King's orders. 

The French wife of the miserable Richard was now only ten 
years old ; and, when her father, Charles of France, heard of her 
misfortunes and of her lonely condition in England, he went mad : 
as he had several times done before, during the last five or six 
years. The French Dukes of Burgundy and Bourbon took up the 
poor girl's cause, without caring much about it, but on the chance 
of getting something out of England. The people of Bordeaux, 
who had a sort of superstitious attachment to the memory of 
Richard, because he was born there, swore by the Lord that he 
had been the best man in all his kingdom — - which was going rather 
far — and promised to do great things against the English. Never- 
theless, when they came to consider that they, and the whole people 
of France, were ruined by their own nobles, and that the EngHsh 



478 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

rule was much the better of the two, they cooled down again ; and 
the two dukes, although they were very great men, could do noth- 
ing without them. Then, began negotiations between France and 
England for the sending home to Paris of the poor little Queen 
with all her jewels and her fortune of two hundred thousand francs 
in gold. The King was quite ^villing to restore the young lady, 
and even the jewels ; but he said he really could not part with the 
money. So, at last she was safely deposited at Paris without her 
fortune, and then the Duke of Burgundy (who was cousin to the 
French King) began to quarrel with the Duke of Orleans (who was 
brother to the French King) about the whole matter ; and those 
two dukes made France even more wretched than ever. 

As the idea of conquering Scotland was still popular at home, 
the King marched to the river Tyne and demanded homage of the 
King of that country. This being refused, he advanced to Edin- 
burgh, but did little there; for, his army being in want of provisions, 
and the Scotch being very careful to hold him in check without 
giving battle, he was obliged to retire. It is to his immortal 
honour that in this sally he burnt no villages and slaughtered no 
people, but was particularly careful that his army should be merci- 
ful and harmless. It was a great example in those ruthless times. 

A war among the border people of England and Scotland went 
on for twelve months, and then the Earl of Northumberland, the 
nobleman who had helped Henry to the crown, began to rebel 
against him — probably because nothing that Henry could do for 
him would satisfy his extravagant expectations. There was a cer- 
tain Welsh gentleman, named Owen Glendower, who had been 
a student in one of the Inns of Court, and had afterwards been in 
the service of the late King, whose Welsh property was taken from 
him by a powerful lord related to the present King, who was his 
neighbour. Appealing for redress, and getting none, he took up 
arms, was made an outlaw, and declared himself sovereign of Wales. 
He pretended to be a magician ; and not only were the Welsh 
people stupid enough to believe him, but, even Henry believed him 
too ; for, making three expeditions into Wales, and being three 
times driven back by the wildness of the country, the bad weather, 
and the skill of Glendower, he thought he w^as defeated by the 
Welshman's magic arts. However, he took Lord Grey and Sir 
Edmund Mortimer, prisoners, and allowed the relatives of Lord 
Grey to ransom him, but would not extend such favour to Sir 
Edmund Mortimer. Now, Henry Percy, called Hotspur, son of 
the Earl of Northumberland, who was married to Mortimer's sister, 
is supposed to have taken offence at this ; and, therefore, in con- 
junction with his father and some others, to have joined Owen 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 479 

Glendower, and risen against Henry. It is by no means clear that 
this was the real cause of the conspiracy ; but perhaps it was made 
the pretext. It was formed, and was very powerful; including 
Scroop, Archbishop of York, and the Eael of Douglas, a power- 
ful and brave Scottish nobleman. The King was prompt and 
active, and the two armies met at Shrewsbury. 

There were about fourteen thousand men in each. The old Earl 
of Northumberland being sick, the rebel forces were led by his son. 
The King wore plain armour to deceive the enemy ; and four noble- 
men, with the same object, wore the royal arms. The rebel charge 
was so furious, that every one of those gentlemen was killed, the 
royal standard was beaten down, and the young Prince of Wales 
was severely wounded in the face. But he was one of the bravest 
and best soldiers that ever lived, and he fought so well, and the 
King's troops were so encouraged by his bold example, that they 
rallied immediately, and cut the enemy's forces all to pieces. Hot- 
spur was kiUed by an arrow in the brain, and the rout was so com- 
plete that the whole rebellion was struck down by this one blow. 
The Earl of Northumberland surrendered himself soon after hearing 
of the death of his son, and received a pardon for all his offences. 

There were some lingerings of rebellion yet : Owen Glendow^er 
being retired to "Wales, and a preposterous story being spread 
among the ignorant people that King Richard was still alive. 
How they could have believed such nonsense it is difficult to im- 
agine ; but they certainly did suppose that the Court fool of the 
late King, who was something like him, was he, himself; so that 
it seemed as if, after giving so much trouble to the country in his 
life, he was still to trouble it after his death. This was not the 
worst. The young Earl of March and his brother were stolen out 
of Windsor Castle. Being retaken, and being found to have been 
spirited away by one Lady Spencer, she accused her own brother, 
that Earl of Rutland who was in the former conspiracy and was 
now Duke of York, of being in the plot. For this he was ruined 
in fortune, though not put to death ; and then another plot arose 
among the old Earl of Northumberland, some other lords, and that 
same Scroop, Archbishop of York, who was with the rebels before. 
These conspirators caused a writing to be posted on the church 
doors, accusing the King of a variety of crimes ; but, the King being 
eager and vigilant to oppose them, they were all taken, and the 
Archbishop was executed. This was the first time that a great 
churchman had been slain by the law in England ; but the King 
was resolved that it should be done, and done it was. 

The next most remarkable event of this time was the seizure, by 
Henry, of the heir to the Scottish throne — James, a boy of nine 



480 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

years old. He bad been put aboard-ship by bis father, the Scottish 
King Robert, to save him from the designs of his uncle, when, on 
his way to France, he was accidentally taken by some English cruis- 
ers. He remained a prisoner in England for nineteen years, and 
became in his prison a student and a famous poet. 

With the exception of occasional troubles with the Welsh and 
with the French, the rest of King Henry's reign was quiet enough. 
But, the King was far from happy, and probably was troubled in 
his conscience by knowing that he had usurped the crown, and 
had occasioned the death of his miserable cousin. The Prince of 
Wales, though brave and generous, is said to have been wild and 
dissipated, and even to have drawn his sword on Gascoigne, the 
Chief Justice of the King's Bench, because he was firm in dealing 
impartially with one of his dissolute companions. Upon this the 
Chief Justice is said to have ordered him immediately to prison ; 
the Prince of Wales is said to have submitted with a good grace ; 
and the King is said to have exclaimed, " Happy is the monarch 
who has so just a judge, and a son so willing to obey the laws." 
This is all very doubtful, and so is another story (of which Shake- 
speare has made beautiful use), that the Prince once took the crown 
out of his father's chamber as he was sleeping, and tried it on his 
own head. 

The King's health sank more and more, and he became subject 
to violent eruptions on the face and to bad epileptic fits, and his 
spirits sank every day. At last, as he was praying before the 
shrine of Saint Edward at Westminster Abbey, he was seized with 
a terrible fit, and was carried into the Abbot's Chamber, where he 
presently died. It had been foretold that he would die at Jerusa- 
lem, which certainly is not, and never was, Westminster. But, as 
the Abbot's room had long been called the Jerusalem chamber, 
people said it was all the same thing, and were quite satisfied with 
the prediction. 

The King died on the 20th of March, 1413, in the forty-seventh 
year of his age, and the fourteenth of his reign. He was buried 
in Canterbury Cathedral. He had been twice married, and had, 
by his first wife, a family of four sons and two daughters. Con- 
sidering his duplicity before he came to the throne, his unjust 
seizure of it, and above all, his making that monstrous law for the 
burning of what the priests called heretics, he was a reasonably 
good king, as kings went. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 481 

CHAPTER XXI. 

england under henry the fifth. 

First Part. 

The Prince of Wales began his reign like a generous and honest 
man. He set the young Earl of March free ; he restored their estates 
and their honours to the Percy family, who had lost them by their 
rebellion against his father ; he ordered the imbecile and unfortunate 
Richard to be honourably buried among the Kings of England ; 
and he dismissed all his wild companions, with assurances that they 
should not want, if they would resolve to be steady, faithful, and true. 

It is much easier to burn men than to burn their opinions ; and 
those of the Lollards were spreading every day. The Lollards were 
represented by the priests — probably falsely for the most part — 
to entertain treasonable designs against the new King ; and Henry, 
suffering himself to be worked upon by these representations, sacri- 
ficed his friend Sir John Oldcastle, the Lord Cobham, to them, 
after trying in vain to convert him by arguments. He was de- 
clared guilty, as the head of the sect, and sentenced to the flames ; 
but he escaped from the Tower before the day of execution (post- 
poned for fifty days by the King himself), and summoned the Lol- 
lards to meet him near London on a certain day. So the priests 
told the King, at least. I doubt whether there was any conspiracy 
beyond such as was got up by their agents. On the day appointed, 
instead of tive-and-twenty thousand men, under the command of 
Sir John Oldcastle, in the meadows of Saint Giles, the King found 
only eighty men, and no Sir John at all. There was, in another 
place, an addle-headed brewer, who had gold trappings to his 
horses, and a pair of gilt spurs in his breast — expecting to be 
made a knight next day by Sir John, and so to gain the right to 
wear them — but there was no Sir John, nor did anybody give 
information respecting him, though the King offered great rewards 
for such intelligence. Thirty of these unfortunate Lollards were 
hanged and drawn immediately, and were then burnt, gallows and 
all ; and the various prisons in and around London were crammed 
full of others. Some of these unfortunate men made various con- 
fessions of treasonable designs ; . but, such confessions were easily 
got, under torture and the fear of fire, and are very little to be 
trusted. To finish the sad story of Sir John Oldcastle at once, I 
may mention that he escaped into Wales, and remained there safely, 
for four years. When discovered by Lord Powis, it is veiy doubt- 
ful if he would have been taken alive — so great was the old sol- 
2i 



482 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

dier's bravery — if a miserable old woman had not come behind 
him and broken his legs with a stool. He was carried to London 
in a horse-litter, was fastened by an iron chain to a gibbet, and so 
roasted to death. 

To make the state of France as plain as I can in a few words, I 
should tell you that the Duke of Orleans, and the Duke of Burgundy, 
commonly called "John without fear," had had a grand reconcilia- 
tion of their quarrel in the last reign, and had appeared to be quite 
in a heavenly state of mind. Immediately after which, on a Sunday, 
in the public streets of Paris, the Duke of Orleans was murdered by 
a party of twenty men, set on by the Duke of Burgundy — accord- 
ing to his own deliberate confession. The widow of King Richard 
had been married in France to the eldest son of the Duke of Orleans. 
The poor mad King was quite powerless to help her, and the Duke 
of Burgundy became the real master of France. Isabella dying, 
her husband (Duke of Orleans since the death of his father) mar- 
ried the daughter of the Count of Armagnac, who, being a much 
abler man than his young son-in-law, headed his party; thence 
called after him Armagnacs. Thus, France was now in this terri- 
ble condition, that it had in it the party of the King's son, the 
Dauphin Louis ; the party of the Duke of Burgundy, who was the 
father of the Dauphin's ill-used wife ; and the party of the Arma- 
gnacs ; all hating each other ; all fighting together ; aU composed 
of the most depraved nobles that the earth has ever known ; and 
all tearing unhappy France to pieces. 

The late King had watched these dissensions from England, 
sensible (like the French people) that no enemy of France could 
injure her more than her own nobility. The present King now ad- 
vanced a claim to the French throne. His demand being, of course, 
refused, he reduced his proposal to a certain large amount of French 
territory, and to demanding the French princess, Catherine, in 
marriage, with a fortune of two millions of golden crowns. He 
was offered less territory and fewer crowns, and no princess ; but 
he called his ambassadors home and prepared for war. Then, he 
proposed to take the princess with one million of crowns. The 
French Court replied that he should have the princess with two 
hundred thousand crowns less ; he said this would not do (he had 
never seen the princess in his life), and assembled his army at 
Southampton. There was a short plot at home just at that time, 
for deposing him, and making the Earl of March King ; but the 
conspirators were all speedily condemned and executed, and the 
King embarked for France. 

It is dreadful to observe how long a bad example will be fol- 
lowed ; but, it is encouraging to know that a good example is 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 483 

never thrown away. The King's first act on disembarking at the 
mouth of the river Seine, three miles from Harfleur, was to imitate 
his father, and to proclaim his solemn orders that the lives and 
property of the peaceable inhabitants should be respected on pain 
of death. It is agreed by French writers, to his lasting renown, 
that even while his soldiers were suffering the greatest distress from 
want of food, these commands were rigidly obeyed. 

With an army in all of thirty thousand men, he besieged the 
town of Harfleur both by sea and land for five weeks ; at the end 
of which time the town surrendered, and the inhabitants were al- 
lowed to depart with only fivepence each, and a part of their clothes. 
All the rest of their possessions was divided amongst the English 
army. But, that army suffered so much, in spite of its successes, 
from disease and privation, that it was already reduced one-half. 
Still, the King was determined not to retire until he had struck a 
greater blow. Therefore, against the advice of all his counsellors, 
he moved on with his little force towards Calais. When he came 
up to the river Somme he was unable to cross, in consequence of 
the fort being fortified ; and, as the English moved up the left 
bank of the river looking for a crossing, the French, who had broken 
all the bridges, moved up the right bank, watching them, and wait- 
ing to attack them when they should try to pass it. At last the 
English found a crossing and got safely over. The French held a 
council of war at Rouen, resolved to give the English battle, and 
sent heralds to King Henry to know by which road he was going. 
" By the road that will take me straight to Calais ! " said the King, 
and sent them away with a present of a hundred crowns. 

The English moved on, until they beheld the French, and then 
the King gave orders to form in line of battle. The French not 
coming on, the army broke up after remaining in battle array till 
night, and got good rest and refreshment at a neighbouring village. 
The French were now all lying in another village, through which 
they knew the English must pass. They were resolved that the 
English should begin the battle. The English had no means of 
retreat, if their King had any such intention ; and so the two 
armies passed the night, close together. 

To understand these armies well, you must bear in mind that 
the immense French army had, among its notable persons, almost 
the whole of that wicked nobility, whose debauchery had made 
France a desert ; and so besotted were they by pride, and by con- 
tempt for the common people, that they had scarcely any bowmen 
(if indeed they had any at all) in their whole enormous number : 
which, compared with the English army, was at least as six to one. 
For these proud fools had said that the bow was not a fit weapon 



484 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

for knightly hands, and that France must be defended by gentle- 
men only. We shall see, presently, what hand the gentlemen 
made of it. 

Now, on the English side, among the little force, there was a 
good proportion of men who were not gentlemen by any means, 
but who were good stout archers for all that. Among them, in 
the morning — having slept little at night, while the French were 
carousing and making sure of victory — the King rode, on a grey 
horse ; wearing on his head a helmet of shining steel, surmounted 
by a crown of gold, sparkling with precious stones ; and bearing 
over his armour, embroidered together, the arms of England and 
the arms of France. The archers looked at the shining helmet 
and the crown of gold and the sparkling jewels, and admired them 
all ; but, what they admired most was the King's cheerful face, 
and his bright blue eye, as he told them that, for himself, he had 
made up his mind to conquer there or to die there, and that Eng- 
land should never have a ransom to pay for him. There was one 
brave knight who chanced to say that he wished some of the many 
gallant gentlemen and good soldiers, who were then idle at home 
in England, were there to increase their numbers. But the King 
told him that, for his part, he did not wish for one more man. 
" The fewer we have," said he, "the greater will be the honour we 
shall win ! " His men, being now all in good heart, were refreshed 
with bread and wine, and heard prayers, and waited quietly for 
the French. The King waited for the French, because they were 
drawn up thirty deep (the little English force was only three deep), 
on very difficult and heavy ground ; and he knew that when they 
moved, there must be confusion among them. 

As they did not move, he sent off two parties : — one to lie con- 
cealed in a. wood on the left of the French : the other, to set fire to 
some houses behind the French after the battle should be begun. 
This was scarcely done, when three of the proud French gentlemen, 
who were to defend their country without any help from the base 
peasants, came riding out, calling upon the English to surrender. 
The King warned those gentlemen himself to retire with all speed 
if they cared for their lives, and ordered the English banners to ad- 
vance. Upon that. Sir Thomas Erpingham, a great English gen- 
eral, who commanded the archers, threw his truncheon into the air, 
joyfully ; and all the English men, kneeling down upon the ground 
and biting it as if they took possession of the country, rose up with 
a great shout and fell upon the French. 

Every archer was furnished with a great stake tipped with iron; 
and his orders were, to thrust this stake into the ground, to dis- 
charge his arrow, and then to fall back, when the French horsemen 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 485 

came on. As the haughty French gentlemen, who were to break 
the English archers and utterly destroy them with their knightly 
lances, came riding up, they were received with such a blinding 
storm of arrows, that they broke and turned. Horses and men 
rolled over one another, and the confusion was terrific. Those who 
rallied and charged the archers got among the stakes on slippery 
and boggy ground, and were so bewildered that the English archers 
— who wore no armour, and even took oft" their leathern coats to be 
more active — cut them to pieces, root and branch. Only three 
French horsemen got within the stakes, and those were instantly 
despatched. All this time the dense French army, being in armour, 
were sinking knee-deep into the mire ; while the light English arch- 
ers, half-naked, were as fresh and active as if they were fighting on 
a marble floor. 

But now, the second division of the French coming to the relief 
of the first, closed up in a firm mass ; the English, headed by the 
King, attacked them ; and the deadliest part of the battle began. 
The King's brother, the Duke of Clarence, was struck down, and 
numbers of the French surrounded him ; but. King Henry, stand- 
ing over the body, fought like a lion until they were beaten off. 

Presently, came up a band of eighteen French knights, bearing 
the banner of a certain French lord, who had sworn to kill or take 
the English King. One of them struck him such a blow with a 
battle-axe that he reeled and fell upon his knees ; but, his faithful 
men, immediately closing round him, killed every one of those eigh- 
teen knights, and so that French lord never kept his oath. 

The French Duke of Alengon, seeing this, made a desperate 
charge, and cut his way close up to the Royal Standard of England. 
He beat down the Duke of York, who was standing near it ; and, 
when the King came to his rescue, struck off a piece of the crown 
he wore. But, he never struck another blow in this world ; for, 
even as he was in the act of saying who he was, and that he sur- 
rendered to the King ; and even as the King stretched out his hand 
to give him a safe and honourable acceptance of the offer ; he fell 
dead, pierced by innumerable wounds. 

The death of this nobleman decided the battle. The third divi- 
sion of the French army, which had never struck a blow yet, and 
which was, in itself, more than double the whole English power, 
broke and fled. At this time of the fight, the English, who as yet had 
made no prisoners, began to take them in immense numbers, and 
were still occupied in doing so, or in killing those who would not 
surrender, when a great noise arose in the rear of the French — 
their flying banners were seen to stop — and King Henry, supposing 
a great reinforcement to have arrived, gave orders that all the pris- 



486 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 

oners should be put to death. As soon, however, as it was found 
that the noise was only occasioned by a body of plundering peasants, 
the terrible massacre was stopped. 

Then King Henry called to him the French herald, and asked 
him to whom the victory belonged. 

The herald replied, " To the King of England." 

" We have not made this havoc and slaughter," said the King. 
" It is the wrath of Heaven on the sins of France. What is the 
name of that castle yonder 1 " 

The herald answered him, " My lord, it is the castle of Azincourt." 

Said the King, " From henceforth this battle shall be known to 
posterity, by the name of the battle of Azincourt." 

Our English historians have made it Agincourt ; but, under that 
name, it will ever be famous in English annals. 

The loss upon the French side was enormous. Three dukes were 
killed, two more were taken prisoners, seven counts were killed, 
three more were taken prisoners, and ten thousand knights and 
gentlemen were slain upon the field. The English loss amounted to 
sixteen hundred men, among whom were the Duke of York and 
the Earl of Suffolk. 

War is a dreadful thing ; and it is appalling to know how the 
English were obliged, next morning, to kill those prisoners mor- 
tally wounded, who yet writhed in agony upon the ground ; how 
the dead upon the French side were stripped by their own country- 
men and countrywomen, and afterwards buried in great pits; how 
the dead upon the English side were piled up in a great barn, and 
how their bodies and the barn were all burned together. It is in 
such things, and in many more much too horrible to relate, that 
the real desolation and wickedness of war consist. Nothing can 
make war otherwise than horrible. But the dark side of it was 
little thought of and soon forgotten ; and it cast no shade of trouble 
on the English people, except on those who had lost friends or re- 
lations in the fight. They welcomed their King home with shouts 
of rejoicing, and plunged into the water to bear him ashore on their 
shoulders, and flocked out in crowds to welcome him in every town 
through which he passed, and hung rich carpets and tapestries out 
of the windows, and strewed the streets with flowers, and made the 
fountains run with wine, as the great field of Agincourt had run 
with blood. 

Second Part. 

That proud and wicked French nobility who dragged their 
country to destruction, and who were every day and every year 
regarded with deeper hatred and detestation in the hearts of the 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 487 

Freiicli people, learnt nothing, even from the defeat of Agincourt. 
So far from uniting against the common enemy, they became, 
among themselves, more violent, more bloody, and more false — 
if that were possible — than they had been before. The Count 
of Armagnac persuaded the French King to plunder of her treas- 
ures Queen Isabella of Bavaria, and to make her a prisoner. She, 
who had hitherto been the bitter enemy of the Duke of Burgundy, 
proposed to join him, in revenge. He carried her off to Troyes, 
where she proclaimed herself Kegent of France, and made him her 
lieutenant. The Armagnac party were at that time possessed of 
Paris ; but, one of the gates of the city being secretly opened on 
a certain night to a party of the duke's men, they got into Paris, 
threw into the prisons all the Armagnacs upon whom they could 
lay their hands, and, a few nights afterwards, mth the aid of a 
furious mob of sixty thousand people, broke the prisons open, and 
killed them all. The former Dauphin was now dead, and the 
King's third son bore the title. Him, in the height of this mur- 
derous scene, a French knight hurried out of bed, wrapped in a 
sheet, and bore away to Poitiers. So, when the revengeful Isa- 
bella and the Duke of Burgundy entered Paris in triumph after 
the slaughter of their enemies, the Dauphin was proclaimed at 
Poitiers as the real Regent. 

King Henry had not been idle since his victory of Agincourt, 
but had repulsed a brave attempt of the French to recover Har- 
fleur ; had gradually conquered a great part of Normandy ; and, 
at this crisis of affairs, took the important town of Rouen, after a 
siege of half a year. This great loss so alarmed the French, that 
the Duke of Burgundy proposed that a meeting to treat of peace 
should be held between the French and the English kings in a 
plain by the river Seine. On the appointed day, King Henry 
appeared there, with his two brothers, Clarence and Gloucester, 
and a thousand men. The unfortunate French King, being more 
mad than usual that day, could not come ; but the Queen came, 
and with her the Princess Catherine : who was a very lovely creat- 
ure, and who made a real impression on King Henry, now that he 
saw her for the first time. This was the most important circum- 
stance that arose out of the meeting. 

As if it were impossible for a French nobleman of that time to be 
true to his word of honour in anything, Henry discovered that the 
Duke of Burgundy was, at that very moment, in secret treaty with 
the Dauphin ; and he therefore abandoned the negotiation. 

The Duke of Burgundy and the Dauphin, each of whom with 
the best reason distrusted the other as a noble ruffian surrounded 
by a party of noble ruffians, were rather at a loss how to proceed 



488 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

after this ; but, at length they agreed to meet, on a bridge over 
the river Yonne, where it was arranged that there should be two 
strong gates put up, with an empty space between them ; and 
that the Duke of Burgundy should come into that space by one 
gate, with ten men only ; and that the Dauphin should come into 
that space by the other gate, also with ten men, and no more. 

So far the Dauphin kept his word, but no farther. When the 
Duke of Burgundy was on his knee before him in the act of speak- 
ing, one of the Dauphin's noble rufl&ans cut the said duke down 
with a small axe, and others speedily finished him. 

It was in vain for the Dauphin to pretend that this base murder 
was not done with his consent ; it was too bad, even for France, 
and caused a general horror. The duke's heir hastened to make 
a treaty with King Henry, and the French Queen engaged that 
her husband should consent to it, whatever it was. Henry made 
peace, on condition of receiving the Princess Catherine in marriage, 
and being made Kegent of France during the rest of the King's 
lifetime, and succeeding to the French crown at his death. He was 
soon married to the beautiful Princess, and took her proudly home 
to England, where she was crowned with great honour and glory. 

This peace was called the Perpetual Peace ; we shall soon see how 
long it lasted. It gave great satisfaction to the French people, 
although they were so poor and miserable, that, at the time of the 
celebration of the Royal marriage, numbers of them were dying 
with starvation, on the dunghills in the streets of Paris. There 
was some resistance on the part of the Dauphin in some few parts 
of France, but King Henry beat it all down. 

And now, with his great possessions in France secured, and his 
beautiful wife to cheer him, and a son born to give him greater 
happiness, all appeared bright before him. But, in the fulness of 
his triumph and the height of his power. Death came upon him, 
and his day was done. When he fell ill at Vincennes, and found 
that he could not recover, he was very calm and quiet, and spoke 
serenely to those who wept around his bed. His wife and child, 
he said, he left to the loving care of his brother the Duke of Bed- 
ford, and his other faithful nobles. He gave them his advice that 
England should establish a friendship with the new Duke of Bur- 
gundy, and offer him the Regency of France ; that it should not set 
free the royal princes who had been taken at Agincourt ; and that, 
whatever quarrel might arise with France, England should never 
make peace without holding Normandy. Then, he laid down his 
head, and asked the attendant priests to chant the penitential 
psalms. Amid which solemn sounds, on the thirty-first of August, 
one thousand four hundred and twenty-two, in only the thirty-fourth 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 489 

year of his age and the tenth of his reign, King Henry the Fifth 
passed away. 

Slowly and mournfully they carried his embalmed body in a pro- 
cession of great state to Paris, and thence to Rouen where his Queen 
was : from whom the sad intelligence of his death was concealed 
until he had been dead some days. Thence, lying on a bed of 
crimson and gold, with a golden crown upon the head, and a golden 
ball and sceptre lying in the nerveless hands, they carried it to Calais, 
with such a great retinue as seemed to dye the road black. The 
King of Scotland acted as chief mourner, all the Royal Household 
followed, the knights wore black armour and black plumes of 
feathers, crowds of men bore torches, making the night as light as 
day ; and the widowed Princess followed last of all. At Calais there 
was a fleet of ships to bring the funeral host to Dover. And so, by 
way of London Bridge, where the service for the dead was chanted 
as it passed along, they brought the body to Westminster Abbey, 
and there buried it with great respect. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

england under henry the sixth. 
Part the First. 

It had been the wish of the late King, that while his infant son 
King Henry the Sixth, at this time only nine months old, was 
under age, the Duke of Gloucester should be appointed Regent. 
The English Parliament, however, preferred to appoint a Council 
of Regency, with the Duke of Bedford at its head : to be repre- 
sented, in his absence only, by the Duke of Gloucester. The Par- 
liament would seem to have been wise in this, for Gloucester soon 
showed himself to be ambitious and troublesome, and, in the grati- 
fication of his own personal schemes, gave dangerous offence to the 
Duke of Burgundy, which was with diflSculty adjusted. 

As that duke declined the Regency of France, it was bestowed 
by the poor French King upon the Duke of Bedford. But, the 
French King dying within two months, the Dauphin instantly 
asserted his claim to the French throne, and was actually crowned 
under the title of Charles the Seventh. The Duke of Bedford, 
to be a match for him, entered into a friendly league with the 
Dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, and gave them his two sisters in 
marriage. War with France was immediately renewed, and the 
Perpetual Peace came to an untimely end. 



490 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

In the first campaign, the English, aided by this alliance, were 
speedily successful. As Scotland, however, had sent the French 
five thousand men, and might send more, or attack the North of 
England while England was busy with France, it was considered 
that it would be a good thing to ofifer the Scottish King, James, 
who had been so long imprisoned, his liberty, on his paying forty 
thousand pounds for his board and lodging during nineteen years, 
and engaging to forbid his subjects from serving under the flag of 
France. It is pleasant to know, not only that the amiable captive 
at last regained his freedom upon these terms, but, that he married 
a noble English lady, with whom he had been long in love, and 
became an excellent King. I am afraid we have met with some 
Kings in this history, and shall meet with some more, who would 
have been very much the better, and would have left the world much 
happier, if they had been imprisoned nineteen years too. 

In the second campaign, the English gained a considerable victory 
at Verneuil, in a battle which was chiefly remarkable, otherwise, 
for their resorting to the odd expedient of tying their baggage-horses 
together by the heads and tails, and jumbling them up with the 
baggage, so as to convert them into a sort of live fortification — 
which was found useful to the troops, but which I should think was 
not agreeable to the horses. For three years afterwards very little 
was done, owing to both sides being too poor for war, which is a 
very expensive entertainment; but, a council was then held in 
Paris, in which it was decided to lay siege to the town of Orleans, 
which was a place of great importance to the Dauphin's cause. An 
English army of ten thousand men was despatched on this service, 
under the command of the Earl of Salisbury, a general of fame. 
He being unfortunately killed early in the siege, the Earl of Suff'olk 
took his place ; under whom (reinforced by Sir John Falstaff, 
who brought up four hundred waggons laden with salt herrings and 
other provisions for the troops, and, beating off the French who 
tried to intercept him, came victorious out of a hot skirmish, which 
was afterwards called in jest the Battle of the Herrings), the town 
of Orleans was so completely hemmed in, that the besieged pro- 
posed to yield it up to their countryman the Duke of Burgundy. 
The English general, however, replied that his English men had 
won it, so far, by their blood and valour, and that his English men 
must have it. There seemed to be no hope for the town, or for 
the Dauphin, who was so dismayed that he even thought of flying 
to Scotland or to Spain — when a peasant girl rose up and changed 
the whole state of affairs. 

The story of this peasant girl I have now to tell. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 491 

Part the Second, 
the story of joan of arc. 

In a remote village among some wild hills in the province of Lor- 
raine, there lived a countryman whose name was Jacques d'Arc. 
He had a daughter, Joan of Arc, who was at this time in her 
twentieth year. She had been a solitary girl from her childhood ; 
she had often tended sheep and cattle for whole days where no human 
figure was seen or human voice heard ; and she had often knelt, for 
hours together, in the gloomy empty little village chapel, looking up 
at the altar and at the dim lamp burning before it, until she fancied 
that she saw shadowy figures standing there, and even that she 
heard them speak to her. The people in that part of France were 
very ignorant and superstitious, and they had many ghostly tales 
to tell about what they had dreamed, and what they saw among the 
lonely hills when the clouds and the mists were resting on them. So, 
they easily believed that Joan saw strange sights, and they whispered 
among themselves that angels and spirits talked to her. 

At last, Joan told her father that she had one day been surprised 
by a great unearthly light, and had afterwards heard a solemn 
voice, which said it was Saint Michael's voice, teUing her that she was 
to go and help the Dauphin. Soon after this (she said), Saint 
Catherine and Saint Margaret had appeared to her with sparkling 
crowns upon their heads, and had encouraged her to be virtuous 
and resolute. These visions had returned sometimes; but the 
Voices very often ; and the Voices always said, " Joan, thou art 
appointed by Heaven to go and help the Dauphin ! " She almost 
always heard them while the chapel bells were ringing. 

There is no doubt, now, that Joan believed she saw and heard 
these things. It is very well known that such delusions are a 
disease which is not by any means uncommon. It is probable 
enough that there were figures of Saint Michael, and Saint Cathe- 
rine, and Saint Margaret, in the little chapel (where they would be 
very likely to have shining crowns upon their heads), and that 
they first gave Joan the idea of those three personages. She had 
long been a moping, fanciful girl, and, though she was a very good 
girl, I dare say she was a little vain, and wishful for notoriety. 

Her father, something wiser than his neighbours, said, " I tell 
thee, Joan, it is thy fancy. Thou hadst better have a kind hus- 
band to take care of thee, girl, and work to employ thy mind ! " 
But Joan told him in reply, that she had taken a vow never to 
have a husband, and that she must go as Heaven directed her, to 
help the Dauphin. 




JOAN OF ARC TENDING THE FLOCK. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 493 

It happened, unfortunately for her father's persuasions, and most 
unfortunately for the poor girl, too, that a party of the Dauphin's 
enemies found their way into the village while Joan's disorder was 
at this point, and burnt the chapel, and drove out the inhabitants. 
The cruelties she saw committed, touched Joan's heart and made 
her worse. She said that the Voices and the figures were now con- 
tinually with her ; that they told her she was the girl who, accord- 
ing to an old prophecy, was to deliver France ; and she must go 
and help the Dauphin, and must remain with him until he should 
be crowned at Rheims : and that she must travel a long way to a 
certain lord named Baudricouet, who could and would bring her 
into the Dauphin's presence. 

As her father still said, "I tell thee, Joan, it is thy fancy," she 
set off to find out this lord, accompanied by an uncle, a poor village 
wheelwright and cart-maker, who believed in the reality of her 
visions. They travelled a long way and went on and on, over a 
rough country, full of the Duke of Burgundy's men, and of all 
kinds of robbers and marauders, until they came to where this lord 
was. 

When his servants told him that there was a poor peasant girl 
named Joan of Arc, accompanied by nobody but an old village 
wheelwright and cart-maker, who wished to see him because she 
was commanded to help the Dauphin and save France, Baudricourt 
burst out a laughing, and bade them send the girl away. But, he 
soon heard so much about her lingering in the town, and praying 
in the churches, and seeing visions, and doing harm to no one, that 
he sent for her, and questioned her. As she said the same things 
after she had been well sprinkled with holy water as she had said 
before the sprinkling, Baudricourt began to think there might be 
something in it. At all events, he thought it worth while to send 
her on to the town of Chinon, where the Dauphin was. So, he 
bought her a horse, and a sword, and gave her two squires to con- 
duct her. As the Voices had told Joan that she was to wear a 
man's dress, now, she put one on, and girded her sword to her side, 
and bound spurs to her heels, and mounted her horse and rode 
away with her two squires. As to her uncle the wheelwright, he 
stood staring at his niece in wonder until she was out of sight — 
as well he might — and then went home again. The best place, 
too. 

Joan and her two squires rode on and on, until they came to 
Chinon, where she was, after some doubt, admitted into the Dau- 
phin's presence. Picking him out immediately from all his court, 
she told him that she came commanded by Heaven to subdue his 
enemies and conduct him to his coronation at Rheims. She also 



494 A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 

told him (or he pretended so afterwards, to make the greater im- 
pression upon his soldiers) a number of his secrets known only to 
himself, and, furthermore, she said there was an old, old sword in 
the cathedral of Saint Catherine at Fierbois, marked with five old 
crosses on the blade, which Saint Catherine had ordered her to wear. 

Now, nobody knew anything about this old, old sword, but 
when the cathedral came to be examined — which was immedi- 
ately done — there, sure enough, the sword was found ! The 
Dauphin then required a number of grave priests and bishops to 
give him their opinion whether the girl derived her power from 
good spirits or from evil spirits, which they held prodigiously long 
debates about, in the course of which several learned men fell fast 
asleep and snored loudly. At last, when one gruff old gentleman 
had said to Joan, "What language do your Voices speak?" and 
when Joan had replied to the gruff old gentleman, " A pleasanter 
language than yours," they agreed that it was all correct, and that 
Joan of Arc was inspired from Heaven. This wonderful circum- 
stance put new heart into the Dauphin's soldiers when they heard 
of it, and dispirited the English army, who took Joan for a witch. 

So Joan mounted horse again, and again rode on and on, until 
she came to Orleans. But she rode now, as never peasant girl had 
ridden yet. She rode upon a white war-horse, in a suit of glitter- 
ing armour; with the old, old sword from the cathedral, newly 
burnished, in her belt ; with a white flag carried before her, upon 
which were a picture of God, and the words Jesus Maria. In 
this splendid state, at the head of a great body of troops escorting 
provisions of all kinds for the starving inhabitants of Orleans, she 
appeared before that beleaguered city. 

When the people on the walls beheld her, they cried out " The 
Maid is come ! The Maid of the Prophecy is come to deliver us ! " 
And this, and the sight of the Maid fighting at the head of their 
men, made the French so bold, and made the English so fearful, 
that the English line of forts was soon broken, the troops and pro- 
visions were got into the town, and Orleans was saved. 

Joan, henceforth called The Maid of Orleans, remained within 
the walls for a few days, and caused letters to be thrown over, 
ordering Lord Suffolk and his Englishmen to depart from before 
the town according to the will of Heaven. As the English general 
very positively declined to believe that Joan knew anything about 
the will of Heaven (which did not mend the matter with his sol- 
diers, for they stupidly said if she were not inspired she was a 
witch, and it was of no use to fight against a witch), she mounted 
her white war-horse again, and ordered her white banner to 
advance. 



A CHn.D'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 495 

The besiegers held the bridge, and some strong towers upon the 
bridge ; and here the Maid of Orleans attacked them. The fight 
was fourteen hours long. She planted a scaling ladder with her 
own hands, and mounted a tower wall, but was struck by an Eng- 
lish arrow in the neck, and fell into the trench. She was carried 
away and the arrow was taken out, during which operation she 
screamed and cried with the pain, as any other girl might have 
done ; but presently she said that the Voices were speaking to her 
and soothing her to rest. After a while, she got up, and was again 
foremost in the fight. When the English who had seen her fall 
and supposed her dead, saw this, they were troubled with the 
strangest fears, and some of them cried out that they beheld Saint 
Michael on a white horse (probably Joan herself) fighting for the 
French. They lost the bridge, and lost the towers, and next day 
set their chain of forts on fire, and left the place. 

But as Lord Suffolk himself retired no farther than the town of 
Jargeau, which was only a few miles off, the Maid of Orleans be- 
sieged him there, and he was taken prisoner. As the white banner 
scaled the wall, she was struck upon the head with a stone, and 
was again tumbled down into the ditch ; but, she only cried all 
the more, as she lay there, " On, on, my countrymen ! And fear 
nothing, for the Lord hath delivered them into our hands ! " Af- 
ter this new success of the Maid's, several other fortresses and 
places which had previously held out against the Dauphin were 
delivered up without a battle ; and at Patay she defeated the re- 
mainder of the English army, and set up her victorious white 
banner on a field where twelve hundred Englishmen lay dead. 

She now urged the Dauphin (who always kept out of the way 
when there was any fighting) to proceed to Rheims, as the first 
part of her mission was accomplished ; and to complete the whole 
by being crowned there. The Dauphin was in no particular hurry 
to do this, as Rheims was a long way off, and the English and the 
Duke of Burgundy were still strong in the country through which 
the road lay. However, they set forth, with ten thousand men, 
and again the Maid of Orleans rode on and on, upon her white war- 
horse, and in her shining armour. Whenever they came to a town 
which yielded readily, the soldiers believed in her ; but, whenever 
they came to a town which gave them any trouble, they began to 
murmur that she was an impostor. The latter was particularly 
the case at Troyes, which finally yielded, however, through the 
persuasion of one Richard, a friar of the place. Friar Richard was 
in the old doubt about the Maid of Orleans, until he had sprinkled 
her well with holy water, and had also well sprinkled the thresh- 
old of the gate by which she came into the city. Finding that it 



496 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

made no change in her or the gate, he said, as the other grave old 
gentlemen had said, that it was all right, and became her great 
ally. 

So, at last, by dint of riding on and on, the Maid of Orleans, 
and the Dauphin, and the ten thousand sometimes believing and 
sometimes unbelieving men, came to Rheims. And in the great 
cathedral of Rheims, the Dauphin actually was crowned Charles 
the Seventh in a great assembly of the people. Then, the Maid, 
who with her white banner stood beside the King in that hour of 
his triumph, kneeled down upon the pavement at his feet, and said, 
with tears, that what she had been inspired to do, was done, and 
that the only recompense she asked for, was, that she should now 
have leave to go back to her distant home, and her sturdily in- 
credulous father, and her first simple escort the village wheelwright 
and cart-maker. But the King said " No ! " and made her and her 
family as noble as a King could, and settled upon her the income 
of a Count. 

Ah ! happy had it been for the Maid of Orleans, if she had re- 
sumed her rustic dress that day, and had gone home to the little 
chapel and the wild hills, and had forgotten all these things, and 
had been a good man's wife, and had heard no stranger voices than 
the voices of little children ! 

It was not to be, and she continued helping the King (she did 
a world for him, in alliance with Friar Richard), and trying to im- 
prove the lives of the coarse soldiers, and leading a religious, an un- 
selfish, and a modest life, herself, beyond any doubt. StiU, many 
times she prayed the King to let her go home ; and once she even 
took off her bright armour and hung it up in a church, mean- 
ing never to wear it more. But, the King always won her back 
again — while she was of any use to him — and so she went on and 
on and on, to her doom. 

When the Duke of Bedford, who was a very able man, began to 
be active for England, and, by bringing the war back into France 
and by holding the Duke of Burgundy to his faith, to distress and 
disturb Charles very much, Charles sometimes asked the Maid of 
Orleans what the Voices said about it ? But, the Voices had be- 
come (very like ordinary voices in perplexed times) contradictory 
and confused, so that now they said one thing, and now said an- 
other, and the Maid lost credit every day. Charles marched on 
Paris, which was opposed to him, and attacked the suburb of Saint 
Honor^. In this fight, being again struck down into the ditch, 
she was abandoned by the whole army. She lay unaided among a 
heap of dead, and crawled out how she could. Then, some of her 
believers went over to an opposition Maid, Catherine of La Ro- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 497 

chelle, who said she was inspired to tell where there were treasures 
of buried money — though she never did — and then Joan accident- 
ally broke the old, old sword, and others said that her power was 
broken with it. Finally, at the siege of Compi^gne, held by the 
Duke of Burgundy, where she did valiant service, she was basely 
left alone in a retreat, though facing about and fighting to the last ; 
and an archer pulled her off her horse. 

the uproar that was made, and the thanksgivings that were 
sung, about the capture of this one poor country-girl ! the way 
in which she was demanded to be tried for sorcery and heresy, and 
anything else you like, by the Inquisitor-General of France, and by 
this great man, and by that great man, until it is wearisome to 
think of ! She was bought at last by the Bishop of Beauvais for 
ten thousand francs, and was shut up in her narrow prison : plain 
Joan of Arc again, and Maid of Orleans no more. 

1 should never have done if I were to tell you how they had Joan 
out to examine her, and cross-examine her, and re-examine her, and 
worry her into saying anything and everything ; and how all sorts 
of scholars and doctors bestowed their utmost tediousness upon her. 
Sixteen times she was brought out and shut up again, and worried, 
and entrapped, and argued with, until she was heart-sick of the 
dreary business. On the last occasion of this kind she was brought 
into a burial-place at Rouen, dismally decorated with a scaffold, and 
a stake and faggots, and the executioner, and a pulpit with a friar 
therein, and an awful sermon ready. It is very affecting to know 
that even at that pass the poor girl honoured the mean vermin of 
a King, who had so used her for his purposes and so abandoned her ; 
and, that while she had been regardless of reproaches heaped upon 
herself, she spoke out courageously for him. 

It was natural in one so young to hold to life. To save her life, 
she signed a declaration prepared for her — signed it with a cross, 
for she couldn't write — that all her visions and Voices had come 
from the Devil. Upon her recanting the past, and protesting that 
she would never wear a man's dress in future, she was condemned 
to imprisonment for life, " on the bread of sorrow and the water of 
affliction." 

But, on the bread of sorrow and the water of affliction, the visions 
and the Voices soon returned. It was quite natural that they 
should do so, for that kind of disease is much aggravated by fast- 
ing, loneliness, and anxiety of mind. It was not only got out of 
Joan that she considered herself inspired again, but, she was taken 
in a man's dress, which had been left — to entrap her — in her 
prison, and which she put on, in her solitude; perhaps, in remem- 
brance of her past glories, perhaps, because the imaginary Voices 
2k 



498 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

told her. For this relapse into the sorcery and heresy and anything 
else you like, she was sentenced to be burnt to death. And, in the 
market-place of Eouen, in the hideous dress which the monks had 
invented for such spectacles ; with priests and bishops sitting in a 
gallery looking on, though some had the Christian grace to go away, 
unable to endure the infamous scene ; this shrieking girl — last seen 
amidst the smoke and fire, holding a crucifix between her hands ; 
last heard, calling upon Christ — was burnt to ashes. They threw 
her ashes into the river Seine; but they will rise against her murder- 
ers on the last day. 

From the moment of her capture, neither the French King nor 
one single man in all his court raised a finger to save her. It is 
no defence of them that they may have never really believed in her, 
or that they may have won her victories by their skill and bravery. 
The more they pretended to believe in her, the more they had caused 
her to believe in herself; and she had ever been true to them, 
ever brave, ever nobly devoted. But, it is no wonder, that they, 
who were in all things false to themselves, false to one another, 
false to their country, false to Heaven, false to Earth, should be 
monsters of ingratitude and treachery to a helpless peasant girl. 

In the picturesque old town of Rouen, where weeds and grass 
grow high on the cathedral towers, and the venerable Norman 
streets are still warm in the blessed sunlight though the monkish 
fires that once gleamed horribly upon them have long grown cold, 
there is a statue of Joan of Arc, in the scene of her last agony, the 
square to which she has given its present name. I know some 
statues of modern times — even in the World's metropolis, I think 
— which commemorate less constancy, less earnestness, smaller 
claims upon the world's attention, and much greater impostors. 

Part the Third. 

Bad deeds seldom prosper, happily for mankind ; and the Eng- 
lish cause gained no advantage from the cruel death of Joan of 
Arc. For a long time, the war went heavily on. The Duke of 
Bedford died ; the alliance with the Duke of Burgundy was broken ; 
and Lord Talbot became a great general on the English side in 
France. But, two of the consequences of wars are. Famine — be- 
cause the people cannot peacefully cultivate the ground — and Pes- 
tilence, which comes of want, misery, and suffering. Both these 
horrors broke out in both countries, and lasted for two wretched 
years. Then, the war went on again, and came by slow degrees 
to be so badly conducted by the English government, that, within 
twenty years from the execution of the Maid of Orleans, of all the 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 499 

great French conquests, the town of Calais alone remained in Eng- 
lish hands. 

While these victories and defeats were taking place in the course 
of time, many strange things happened at home. The young King, 
as he grew up, proved to be very unlike his great father, and showed 
himself a miserable puny creature. There was no harm in him — 
he had a great aversion to shedding blood : which was something — 
but, he was a weak, silly, helpless young man, and a mere shuttle- 
cock to the great lordly battledores about the Court. 

Of these battledores, Cardinal Beaufort, a relation of the King, 
and the Duke of Gloucester, were at first the most powerful. The 
Duke of Gloucester had a wife, who was nonsensically accused of 
practising witchcraft to cause the King's death and lead to her hus- 
band's coming to the throne, he being the next heir. She was 
charged with having, by the help of a ridiculous old woman named 
Margery (who was called a witch), made a little waxen doll in the 
King's likeness, and put it before a slow fire that it might gradually 
melt away. It was supposed, in such cases, that the death of the 
person whom the doll was made to represent, was sure to happen. 
Whether the duchess was as ignorant as the rest of them, and 
really did make such a doll with such an intention, I don't know; 
but, you and I know very well that she might have made a thou- 
sand dolls, if she had been stupid enough, and might have melted 
them all, without hurting the King or anybody else. However, she 
was tried for it, and so was old Margery, and so was one of the 
duke's chaplains, who was charged with having assisted them. Both 
he and Margery were put to death, and the duchess, after being 
taken on foot and bearing a lighted candle, three times round the 
City, as a penance, was imprisoned for life. The duke, himself, 
took all this pretty quietly, and made as little stir about the mat- 
ter as if he were rather glad to be rid of the duchess. 

But, he was not destined to keep himself out of trouble long. 
The royal shuttlecock being three-and-twenty, the battledores were 
very anxious to get him married. The Duke of Gloucester wanted 
him to marry a daughter of the Count of Armagnac ; but, the Car- 
dinal and the Earl of Suffolk were all for Margaket, the daughter 
of the King of Sicily, who they knew was a resolute ambitious 
woman and would govern the King as she chose. To make friends 
with this lady, the Earl of Suffolk, who went over to arrange the 
match, consented to accept her for the King's wife without any 
fortune, and even to give up the two most valuable possessions 
England then had in France. So, the marriage was arranged, on 
terms very advantageous to the lady ; and Lord Suffolk brought her 
to England, and she was married at Westminster. On what pre- 



600 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

tence this Queen and her party charged the Duke of Gloucester 
with high treason within a couple of years, it is impossible to make 
out, the matter is so confused ; but, they pretended that the King's 
life was in danger, and they took the duke prisoner. A fortnight 
afterwards, he was found dead in bed (they said), and his body was 
shown to the people, and Lord Suffolk came in for the best part of 
his estates. You know by this time how strangely liable state 
prisoners were to sudden death. 

If Cardinal Beaufort had any hand in this matter, it did him no 
good, for he died within six weeks ; thinking it very hard and curi- 
ous — at eighty years old ! — that he could not live to be Pope. 

This was the time when England had completed her loss of all 
her great French conquests. The people charged the loss princi- 
pally upon the Earl of Suffolk, now a duke, who had made those 
easy terms about the Royal Marriage, and who, they believed, had 
even been bought by France. So he was impeached as a traitor, 
on a great number of charges, but chiefly on accusations of having 
aided the French King, and of designing to make his own son King 
of England. The Commons and the people being violent against 
him, the King was made (by his friends) to interpose to save him, 
by banishing him for five years, and proroguing the Parliament. 
The duke had much ado to escape from a London mob, two thou- 
sand strong, who lay in wait for him in Saint Giles's fields ; but, 
he got down to his own estates in Suffolk, and sailed away from 
Ipswich. Sailing across the Channel, he sent into Calais to know 
if he might land there ; but, they kept his boat and men in the 
harbour, until an English ship, carrying a hundred and fifty men 
and called the Nicholas of the Tower, came alongside his little vessel, 
and ordered him on board. "Welcome, traitor, as men say," was 
the captain's grim and not very respectful salutation. He was kept 
on board, a prisoner, for eight-and-forty hours, and then a small 
boat appeared rowing toward the ship. As this boat came nearer, 
it was seen to have in it a block, a rusty sword, and an executioner 
in a black mask. The duke was handed down into it, and there 
his head was cut off with six strokes of the rusty sword. Then, 
the little boat rowed away to Dover beach, where the body was cast 
out, and left until the duchess claimed it. By whom, high in 
authority, this murder was committed, has never appeared. No 
one was ever punished for it. 

There now arose in Kent an Irishman, who gave himself the 
name of Mortimer, but whose real name was Jack Cade. Jack, 
in imitation of Wat Tyler, though he was a very different and in- 
ferior sort of man, addressed the Kentish men upon their wrongs, 
occasioned by the bad government of England, among so many 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 501 

battledores and such a poor shuttlecock ; and the Kentish men rose 
up to the number of twenty thousand. Their place of assembly 
Avas Blackheath, where, headed by Jack, they put forth two papers, 
which they called "The Complaint of the Commons of Kent," and 
" The Requests of the Captain of the Great Assembly in Kent." 
They then retired to Sevenoaks. The royal army coming up with 
them here, they beat it and killed their general. Then, Jack 
dressed himself in the dead general's armour, and led his men to 
London. 

Jack passed into the City from Southwark, over the bridge, and 
entered it in triumph, giving the strictest orders to his men not to 
plunder. Having made a show of his forces there, while the citi- 
zens looked on quietly, he went back into Southwark in good order, 
and passed the night. Next day, he came back again, having got 
hold in the meantime of Lord Say, an unpopular nobleman. Says 
Jack to the Lord Mayor and judges : " Will you be so good as to 
make a tribunal in Guildhall, and try me this nobleman 1 " The 
court being hastily made, he was found guilty, and Jack and his 
men cut his head off on Cornhill. They also cut off the head of 
his son-in-law, and then went back in good order to Southwark 
again. 

But, although the citizens could bear the beheading of an un- 
popular lord, they could not bear to have their houses pillaged. 
And it did so happen that Jack, after dinner — perhaps he had 
drunk a little too much — began to plunder the house where he 
lodged ; upon which, of course, his men began to imitate him. 
Wherefore, the Londoners took counsel with Lord Scales, who had 
a thousand soldiers in the Tower ; and defended London Bridge, 
and kept Jack and his people out. This advantage gained, it was 
resolved by divers great men to divide Jack's army in the old way, 
by making a great many promises on behalf of the state, that were 
never intended to be performed. This did divide them ; some of 
Jack's men saying that they ought to take the conditions which 
were offered, and others saying that they ought not, for they were 
only a snare; some going home at once ; others staying where they 
were ; and all doubting and quarrelling among themselves. 

Jack, who was in two minds about fighting or accepting a par- 
don, and who indeed did both, saw at last that there was nothing to 
expect from his men, and that it was very likely some of them 
would deliver him up and get a reward of a thousand marks, which 
was offered for his apprehension. So, after they had travelled and 
quarrelled all the way from Southwark to Blackheath, and from 
Blackheath to Rochester, he mounted a good horse and galloped 
away into Sussex. But, there galloped after him, on a better horse, 



502 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

one Alexander Iden, who came up with him, had a hard fight with 
him, and killed him. Jack's head was set aloft on London Bridge, 
with the face looking towards Blackheath, where he had raised his 
flag ; and Alexander Iden got the thousand marks. 

It is supposed by some, that the Duke of York, who had been 
removed from a high post abroad through the Queen's influence, 
and sent out of the way, to govern Ireland, was at the bottom of 
this rising of Jack and his men, because he wanted to trouble the 
government. He claimed (though not yet publicly) to have a bet- 
ter right to the throne than Henry of Lancaster, as one of the 
family of the Earl of March, whom Henry the Fourth had set aside. 
Touching this claim, which, being through female relationship, was 
not according to the usual descent, it is enough to say that Henry 
the Fourth was the free choice of the people and the Parliament, 
and that his family had now reigned undisputed for sixty years. 
The memory of Henry the Fifth was so famous, and the English 
people loved it so much, that the Duke of York's claim would, 
perhaps, never have been thought of (it would have been so hope- 
less) but for the unfortunate circumstance of the present King's 
being by this time quite an idiot, and the country very ill governed. 
These two circumstances gave the Duke of York a power he could 
not otherwise have had. 

Whether the duke knew anything of Jack Cade, or not, he came 
over from Ireland while Jack's head was on London Bridge; being 
secretly advised that the Queen was setting up his enemy, the 
Duke of Somerset, against him. He went to Westminster, at the 
head of four thousand men, and on his knees before the King, rep- 
resented to him the bad state of the country, and petitioned him 
to summon a Parliament to consider it. This the King promised. 
When the Parliament was summoned, the Duke of York accused 
the Duke of Somerset, and the Duke of Somerset accused the 
Duke of York ; and, both in and out of Parliament, the followers 
of each party were full of violence and hatred towards the other. 
At length the Duke of York put himself at the head of a large 
force of his tenants, and, in arms, demanded the reformation of the 
Government. Being shut out of London, he encamped at Dartford, 
and the royal army encamped at Blackheath. According as either 
side triumphed, the Duke of York was arrested, or the Duke of 
Somerset was arrested. The trouble ended, for the moment, in 
the Duke of York renewing his oath of allegiance, and going in 
peace to one of his own castles. 

Half a year afterwards the Queen gave birth to a son, who was 
very ill received by the people, and not believed to be the son of 
the King. It shows the Duke of York to have been a moderate 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 503 

man, unwilling to involve England in new troubles, that he did 
nob take advantage of the general discontent at this time, but 
really acted for the public good. He was made a member of the 
cabinet, and the King being now so much worse that he could not 
be carried about and shown to the people with any decency, the 
duke was made Lord Protector of the kingdom, until the King 
should recover, or the Prince should come of age. At the same 
time the Duke of Somerset was committed to the Tower. So, now 
the Duke of Somerset was down, and the Duke of York was up. 
By the end of the year, however, the King recovered his memory 
and some spark of sensg ; upon which the Queen used her power 
— which recovered with him — to get the Protector disgraced, and 
her favourite released. So now the Duke of York was down, and 
the Duke of Somerset was up. 

These ducal ups and downs gradually separated the whole nation 
into the two parties of York and Lancaster, and led to those ter- 
rible civil wars long known as the "Wars of the Red and White 
Roses, because the red rose was the badge of the House of Lancas- 
ter, and the white rose was the badge of the House of York. 

The Duke of York, joined by some other powerful noblemen of 
the White Rose party, and leading a small army, met the King 
with another small army at St. Alban's, and demanded that the 
Duke of Somerset should be given up. The poor King, being made 
to say in answer that he would sooner die, was instantly attacked. 
The Duke of Somerset was killed, and the King himself was 
wounded in the neck, and took refuge in the house of a poor 
tanner. Whereupon, the Duke of York went to him, led him 
with great submission to the Abbey, and said he was very sorry 
for what had happened. Having now the King in his possession, 
he got a Parliament summoned and himself once more made Pro- 
tector, but, only for a few months ; for, on the King getting a 
little better again, the Queen and her party got him into their pos- 
session, and disgraced the duke once more. So, now the Duke of 
York was down again. 

Some of the best men in power, seeing the danger of these con- 
stant changes, tried even then to prevent the Red and the White 
Rose Wars. They brought about a great council in London be- 
tween the two parties. The White Roses assembled in Blackfriars, 
the Red Roses in Whitefriars ; and some good priests communicated 
between them, and made the proceedings known at evening to the 
King and the judges. They ended in a peaceful agreement that 
there should be no more quarrelling ; and there was a great royal 
procession to Saint Paul's, in which the Queen walked arm-in-arm 
with her old enemy, the Duke of York, to show the people how 



504 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

comfortable they all were. This state of peace lasted half a year, 
when a dispute between the Earl of Warwick (one of the Duke's 
powerful friends) and some of the King's servants at Court, led to 
an attack upon that Earl — who was a White Rose — and to a 
sudden breaking out of all old animosities. So, here were greater 
ups and downs than ever. 

There were even greater ups and downs than these, soon after. 
After various battles, the Duke of York fled to Ireland, and his 
son the Earl of March to Calais, with their friends the Earls of 
Salisbury and Warwick ; and a Parliament was held declaring them 
all traitors. Little the worse for this, the Earl of Warwick pres- 
ently came back, landed in Kent, was joined by the Archbishop of 
Canterbury and other powerful noblemen and gentlemen, engaged 
the King's forces at Northampton, signally defeated them, and 
took the King himself prisoner, who was found in his tent. War- 
wick would have been glad, I dare say, to have taken the Queen 
and Prince too, but they escaped into Wales and thence into 
Scotland. 

The King was carried by the victorious force straight to London, 
and made to call a new Parliament, which immediately declared 
that the Duke of York and those other noblemen were not traitors, 
but excellent subjects. Then, back comes the duke from Ireland 
at the head of five hundred horsemen, rides from London to West- 
minster, and enters the House of Lords. There, he laid his hand 
upon the cloth of gold which covered the empty throne, as if he 
had half a mind to sit down in it — but he did not. On the 
Archbishop of Canterbury asking him if he would visit the King, 
who was in his palace close by, he replied " I know no one in this 
country, my lord, who ought not to visit me." None of the lords 
present spoke a single word; so, the duke went out as he had 
come in, established himself royally in the King's palace, and, six 
days afterwards, sent in to the Lords a formal statement of his 
claim to the throne. The Lords went to the King on this momen- 
tous subject, and after a great deal of discussion, in which the 
judges and the other law officers were afraid to give an opinion 
on either side, the question was compromised. It was agreed that 
the present King should retain the crown for his life, and that it 
should then pass to the Duke of York and his heirs. 

But, the resolute Queen, determined on asserting her son's right, 
would hear of no such thing. She came from Scotland to the 
north of England, where several powerful lords armed in her cause. 
The Duke of York, for his part, set off with some five thousand 
men, a little time before Christmas Day, one thousand four hun- 
dred and sixty, to give her battle. He lodged at Sandal Castle, 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 605 

near Wakefield, and the Red Roses defied him to come out on 
Wakefield Green, and fight them then and there. His generals 
said, he had best wait until his gallant son, the Eaii of March, 
came up with his power ; but, he was determined to accept the 
challenge. He did so, in an evil hour. He was hotly pressed on 
all sides, two thousand of his men lay dead on Wakefield Green, 
and he himself was taken prisoner. They set him down in mock 
state on an ant-hill, and twisted grass about his head, and pre- 
tended to pay court to him on their knees, saying, " King, with- 
out a kingdom, and Prince without a people, we hope your gracious 
Majesty is very well and happy ! " They did worse than this ; 
they cut his head off", and handed it on a pole to the Queen, who 
laughed with delight when she saw it (you recollect their walking 
so religiously and comfortably to Saint Paul's !), and had it fixed, 
with a paper crown upon its head, on the walls of York. The 
Earl of Salisbury lost his head, too ; and the Duke of York's sec- 
ond son, a handsome boy who was flying with his tutor over 
Wakefield Bridge, was stabbed in the heart by a murderous lord 
— Lord Clifford by name — whose father had been killed by the 
White Roses in the fight at St. Alban's. There was awful sacri- 
fice of life in this battle, for no quarter was given, and the Queen 
was wild for revenge. When men unnaturally fight against their 
own countrymen, they are always observed to be more unnaturally 
cruel and filled with rage than they are against any other enemy. 

But, Lord Clifibrd had stabbed the second son of the Duke of 
York — not the first. The eldest son, Edward Earl of March, 
was at Gloucester; and, vowing vengeance for the death of his 
father, his brother, and their faithful friends, he began to march 
against the Queen. He had to turn and fight a great body of 
Welsh and Irish first, who worried his advance. These he defeated 
in a great fight at Mortimer's Cross, near Hereford, where he be- 
headed a number of the Red Roses taken in battle, in retaliation 
for the beheading of the White Roses at Wakefield. The Queen 
had the next turn of beheading. Having moved towards London, 
and faUing in, between St, Alban's and Barnet, with the Earl of 
Warwick and the Duke of Norfolk, White Roses both, who were 
there with an army to oppose her, and had got the King with 
them ; she defeated them with great loss, and struck off the heads 
of two prisoners of note, who were in the King's tent with him, 
and to whom the King had promised his protection. Her triumph, 
however, was very short. She had no treasure, and her army 
subsisted by plunder. This caused them to be hated and dreaded 
by the people, and particularly by the London people, who were 
wealthy. As soon as the Londoners heard that Edward, Earl of 



506 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

March, united with the Earl of Warwick, was advancing towards 
the city, they refused to send the Queen supplies, and made a 
great rejoicing. 

The Queen and her men retreated with all speed, and Edward 
and Warwick came on, greeted with loud acclamations on every 
side. The courage, beauty, and virtues of young Edward could 
not be sufficiently praised by the whole people. He rode into 
London like a conqueror, and met with an enthusiastic welcome. 
A few days afterwards. Lord Falconbridge and the Bishop of Exeter 
assembled the citizens in Saint John's Field, Clerkenwell, and asked 
them if they would have Henry of Lancaster for their King ? To 
this they all roared, "No, no, no!" and "King Edward! King 
Edward ! " Then, said those noblemen, would they love and serve 
young Edward! To this they all cried, "Yes, yes!" and threw 
up their caps and clapped their hands, and cheered tremendously. 

Therefore, it was declared that by joining the Queen and not pro- 
tecting those two prisoners of note, Henry of Lancaster had for- 
feited the crown ; and Edward of York was proclaimed King. He 
made a great speech to the applauding people at Westminster, and 
sat down as sovereign of England on that throne, on the golden 
covering of which his father — worthy of a better fate than the 
bloody axe which cut the thread of so many lives in England, 
through so many years — had laid his hand. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE FOURTH. 

King Edward the Fourth was not quite twenty-one years of 
age when he took that unquiet seat upon the throne of England. 
The Lancaster party, the Red Roses, were then assembling in great 
numbers near York, and it was necessary to give them battle in- 
stantly. But, the stout Earl of Warwick leading for the young 
King, and the young King himself closely following him, and the 
English people crowding round the Royal standard, the White and 
the Red Roses met, on a wild March day when the snow was fall- 
ing heavily, at Towton ; and there such a furious battle raged be- 
tween them, that the total loss amounted to forty thousand men 
— all Englishmen, fighting, upon English ground, against one an- 
other. The young King gained the day, took down the heads of 
his father and brother from the walls of York, and put up the 
heads of some of the most famous noblemen engaged in the battle 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 507 

on the other side. Then, he went to London and was crowned 
with great splendour. 

A new Parliament met. No fewer than one hundred and fifty 
of the principal noblemen and gentlemen on the Lancaster side 
were declared traitors, and the King — who had very little human- 
ity, though he was handsome in person and agreeable in manners 
— resolved to do all he could, to pluck up the Red Rose root and 
branch. 

Queen Margaret, however, was still active for her young son. 
She obtained help from Scotland and from Normandy, and took 
several important English castles. But, Warwick soon retook 
them; the Queen lost all her treasure on board ship in a great 
storm ; and both she and her son suffered great misfortunes. Once, 
in the winter weather, as they were riding through a forest, they 
were attacked and plundered by a party of robbers; and, when 
they had escaped from these men and were passing alone and on 
foot through a thick dark part of the wood, they came, all at once, 
upon another robber. So the Queen, with a stout heart, took the 
little Prince by the hand, and going straight up to that robber, 
said to him, "My friend, this is the young son of your lawful 
King ! I confide him to your care." The robber was surprised, 
but took the boy in his arms, and faithfully restored him and his 
mother to their friends. In the end, the Queen's soldiers being 
beaten and dispersed, she went abroad again, and kept quiet for 
the present. 

Now, all this time, the deposed King Henry was concealed by a 
Welsh knight, who kept him close in his castle. But, next year, 
the Lancaster party recovering their spirits, raised a large body of 
men, and called him out of his retirement, to put him at their 
head. They were joined by some powerful noblemen who had sworn 
fidelity to the new King, but who were ready, as usual, to break 
their oaths, whenever they thought there was anything to be got by 
it. One of the worst things in the history of the war of the Red 
and White Roses is the ease with which these noblemen, who 
should have set an example of honour to the people, left either side 
as they took slight ofi'ence, or were disappointed in their greedy ex- 
pectations, and joined the other. Well ! Warwick's brother soon 
beat the Lancastrians, and the false noblemen, being taken, were 
beheaded without a moment's loss of time. The deposed King had 
a narrow escape ; three of his servants were taken, and one of them 
bore his cap of estate, which was set with pearls and embroidered 
with two golden crowns. However, the head to which the cap 
belonged got safely into Lancashire, and lay pretty quietly there 
(the people in the secret being very true) for more than a year. At 







f\#-*- 



QUEEN MARGARET AND THE ROBBERS. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 509 

length, an old monk gave such intelligence as led to Henry's being 
taken while he was sitting at dinner in a place called Waddington 
Hall. He was immediately sent to London, and met at Islington 
by the Earl of Warwick, by whose directions he was put upon a 
horse, with his legs tied under it, and paraded three times round 
the pillory. Then, he was carried off to the Tower, where they 
treated him well enough. 

The White Rose being so triumphant, the young King abandoned 
himself entirely to pleasure, and led a jovial life. But, thorns 
were springing up under his bed of roses, as he soon found out. 
For, having been privately married to Elizabeth Woodville, a 
young widow lady, very beautiful and very captivating ; and at last 
resolving to make his secret known, and to declare her his Queen ; 
he gave some offence to the Earl of Warwick, who was usually 
called the King-Maker, because of his power and influence, and be- 
cause of his having lent such great help to placing Edward on the 
throne. This offence was 'not lessened by the jealousy with which 
the Nevil family (the Earl of Warwick's) regarded the promotion of 
the Woodville family. For, the young Queen was so bent on pro- 
viding for her relations, that she made her father an earl and a great 
officer of state; married her five sisters to young noblemen of 
the highest rank; and provided for her younger brother, a young 
man of twenty, by marrying him to an immensely rich old duchess 
of eighty. The Earl of Warwick took all this pretty graciously for 
a man of his proud temper, until the question arose to whom the 
King's sister, Makgaeet, should be married. The Earl of War- 
wick said, " To one of the French King's sons," and was allowed 
to go over to the French King to make friendly proposals for that 
purpose, and to hold all manner of friendly interviews with him. 
But, while he was so engaged, the Woodville party married the 
young lady to the Duke of Burgundy ! Upon this he came back in 
great rage and scorn, and shut himself up discontented, in his Castle 
of Middleham. 

A reconciliation, though not a very sincere one, was patched up 
between the Earl of Warwick and the King, and lasted until the 
earl married his daughter, against the King's wishes, to the Duke 
of Clarence. While the marriage was being celebrated at Calais, 
the people in the north of England, where the influence of the 
Nevil family was strongest, broke out into rebellion ; their com- 
plaint was, that England was oppressed and plundered by the Wood- 
ville family, whom they demanded to have removed from power. 
As they were joined by great numbers of people, and as they openly 
declared that they were supported by the Earl of Warwick, the 
King did not know what to do. At last, as he wrote to the earl 



510 A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 

beseeching his aid, he and his new son-in-law came over to Eng- 
land, and began to arrange the business by shutting the King up 
in Middleham Castle in the safe keeping of the Archbishop of York ; 
so England was not only in the strange position of having two 
Kings at once, but they were both prisoners at the same time. 

Even as yet, however, the King-Maker was so far true to the 
King, that he dispersed a new rising of the Lancastrians, took their 
leader prisoner, and brought him to the King, who ordered him to 
be immediately executed. He presently allowed the King to return 
to London, and there innumerable pledges of forgiveness and friend- 
ship were exchanged between them, and between the Nevils and 
the Woodvilles ; the King's eldest daughter was promised in mar- 
riage to the heir of the Nevil family ; and more friendly oaths 
were sworn, and more friendly promises made, than this book would 
hold. 

They lasted about three months. At the end of that time, the 
Archbishop of York made a feast for the King, the Earl of War- 
wick, and the Duke of Clarence, at his house, the Moor, in Hert- 
fordshire. The King was washing his hands before supper, when 
some one whispered him that a body of a hundred men were lying 
in ambush outside the house. Whether this were true or untrue, 
the King took fright, mounted his horse, and rode through the dark 
night to Windsor Castle. Another reconciliation was patched up 
between him and the King-Maker, but it was a short one, and it 
was the last. A new rising took place in Lincolnshire, and the 
King marched to repress it. Having done so, he proclaimed that 
both the Earl of Warwick and the Duke of Clarence were traitors, 
who had secretly assisted it, and who had been prepared publicly 
to join it on the following day. In these dangerous circumstances 
they both took ship and sailed away to the French court. 

And here a meeting took place between the Earl of Warwick and 
his old enemy, the Dowager Queen Margaret, through whom his 
father had had his head struck off, and to whom he had been a 
bitter foe. But, now, when he said that he had done with the un- 
grateful and perfidious Edward of York, and that henceforth he de- 
voted himself to the restoration of the House of Lancaster, either 
in the person of her husband or of her little son, she embraced him 
as if he had ever been her dearest friend. She did more than that ; 
she married her son to his second daughter, the Lady Anne. How- 
ever agreeable this marriage was to the new friends, it was very 
disagreeable to the Duke of Clarence, who perceived that his father- 
in-law, the King-Maker, would never make Jiim King, now. So, 
being but a weak-minded young traitor, possessed of very little 
worth or sense, he readily listened to an artful court lady sent over 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 511 

for the purpose, and promised to turn traitor once more, and go 
over to his brother, King Edward, when a fitting opportunity 
should come. 

The Earl of Warwick, knowing nothing of this, soon redeemed 
his promise to the Dowager Queen Margaret, by invading England 
and landing at Plymouth, where he instantly proclaimed King Henry, 
and summoned all Englishmen between the ages of sixteen and sixty, 
to join his banner. Then, with his army increasing as he marched 
along, he went northward, and came so near King Edward, who 
was in that part of the country, that Edward had to ride hard for 
it to the coast of Norfolk, and thence to get away in such ships as 
he could find, to Holland. Thereupon, the triumphant King-Maker 
and his false son-in-law, the Duke of Clarence, went to London, 
took the old King out of the Tower, and walked him in a great 
procession to Saint Paul's Cathedral with the crown upon his head. 
This did not improve the temper of the Duke of Clarence, who saw 
himself farther off from being King than ever ; but he kept his 
secret, and said nothing. The Nevil family were restored to all 
their honours and glories, and the Woodvilles and the rest were 
disgraced. The King-Maker, less sanguinary than the King, shed 
no blood except that of the Earl of Worcester, who had been so 
cruel to the people as to have gained the title of the Butcher. 
Him they caught hidden in a tree, and him they tried and executed. 
No other death stained the King-Maker's triumph. 

To dispute this triumph, back came King Edward again, next 
year, landing at Ravenspur, coming on to York, causing all his 
men to cry " Long live King Henry ! " and swearing on the altar, 
without a blush, that he came to lay no claim to the crown. Now 
was the time for the Duke of Clarence, who ordered his men to as- 
sume the White Rose, and declare for his brother. The Marquis 
of Montague, though the Earl of Warwick's brother, also declining 
to fight against King Edward, he went on successfully to London, 
where the Archbishop of York let him into the City, and where the 
people made great demonstrations in his favour. For this they had 
four reasons. Firstly, there were great numbers of the King's ad- 
herents hiding in the City and ready to break out ; secondly, the 
King owed them a great deal of money, which they could never 
hope to get if he were unsuccessful ; thirdly, there was a young 
prince to inherit the crown ; and fourthly, the King was gay and 
handsome, and more popular than a better man might have been 
with the City ladies. After a stay of only two days with these 
worthy supporters, the King marched out to Barnet Common, to 
give the Earl of Warwick battle. And now it was to be seen, for the 
last time, whether the King or the King-Maker was to carry the day. 



512 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

While the battle was yet pending, the faint-hearted Duke of 
Clarence began to repent, and sent over secret messages to his 
father-in-law, offering his services in mediation with the King. 
But, the Earl of Warwick disdainfully rejected them, and replied 
that Clarence was false and perjured, and that he would settle the 
quarrel by the sword. The battle began at four o'clock in the 
morning and lasted until ten, and during the greater part of 
the time it was fought in a thick mist — absurdly supposed to be 
raised by a magician. The loss of life was very great, for the 
hatred was strong on both sides. The King-Maker was defeated, 
and the King triumphed. Both the Earl of Warwick and his 
brother were slain, and their bodies lay in Saint Paul's, for some 
days, as a spectacle to the people. 

Margaret's spirit was not broken even by this great blow. Within 
five days she was in arms again, and raised her standard in Bath, 
whence she set off with her army, to try and join Lord Pembroke, 
who had a force in Wales. But, the King, coming up with her 
outside the town of Tewlcesbury, and ordering his brother, the 
Duke of Gloucestek, who was a brave soldier, to attack her 
men, she sustained an entire defeat, and was taken prisoner, to- 
gether with her son, now only eighteen years of age. The conduct 
of the King to this poor youth was worthy of his cruel character. 
He ordered him to be led into his tent. "And what," said he, 
"brought you to England?" "I came to England," replied the 
prisoner, with a spirit which a man of spirit might have admired 
in a captive, " to recover my father's kingdom, which descended to 
him as his right, and from him descends to me, as mine." The 
King, drawing off his iron gauntlet, struck him with it in the face ; 
and the Duke of Clarence and some other lords, who were there, 
drew their noble swords, and killed him. 

His mother survived him, a prisoner, for five years ; after her 
ransom by the King of France, she survived for six years more. 
Within three weeks of this murder, Henry died one of those con- 
venient sudden deaths which were so common in the Tower; in 
plainer words, he was murdered by the King's order. 

Having no particular excitement on his hands after this great 
defeat of the Lancaster party, and being perhaps desirous to get 
rid of some of his fat (for he was now getting too corpulent to be 
handsome), the King thought of making war on France. As he 
wanted more money for this purpose than the Parliament could give 
him, though they were usually ready enough for war, he invented a 
new way of raising it, by sending for the principal citizens of Lon- 
don, and telling them, with a grave face, that he was very much in 
want of cash, and would take it very kind in them if they would 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 513 

lend him some. It being impossible for them safely to refuse, they 
complied, and the moneys thus forced from them were called — no 
doubt to the great amusement of the King and the Court — as if 
they were free gifts, "Benevolences." What with grants from 
Parliament, and what with Benevolences, the King raised an army 
and passed over to Calais. As nobody wanted war, however, the 
French King made proposals of peace, which vere accepted, and a 
truce was concluded for seven long years. The proceedings between 
the Kings of France and England on this occasion were very friendly, 
very splendid, and very distrustful. They finished with a meeting 
between the two Kings, on a temporary bridge over the river 
Somme, where they embraced through two holes in a strong wooden 
grating like a lion's cage, and made several bows and fine speeches 
to one another. 

It was time, now, that the Duke of Clarence should be punished 
for his treacheries; and Fate had his punishment in store. He 
was, probably, not trusted by the King — for who coidd trust him 
who knew him ! — and he had certainly a powerful opponent in his 
brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who, being avaricious and 
ambitious, wanted to marry that widowed daughter of the Earl of 
Warwick's who had been espoused to the deceased young Prince, 
at Calais. Clarence, who wanted all the family wealth for himself, 
secreted this lady, whom Richard found disguised as a servant in 
the City of London, and whom he married ; arbitrators appointed 
by the King then divided the property between the brothers. 
This led to ill-will and mistrust between them. Clarence's wife 
dying, and he wishing to make another marriage, which was obnox- 
ious to the King, his ruin was hurried by that means, too. At 
first, the Court struck at his retainers and dependents, and accused 
some of them of magic and witchcraft, and similar nonsense. Suc- 
cessful against this small game, it then mounted to the duke him- 
self, who was impeached by his brother the King, in person, on a 
variety of such charges. He was found guilty, and sentenced to 
be publicly executed. He never was publicly executed, but he met 
his death somehow, in the Tower, and, no doubt, through some 
agency of the King or his brother Gloucester, or both. It was 
supposed at the time that he was told to choose the manner of his 
death, and that he chose to be drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. 
I hope the story may be true, for it would have been a becoming 
death for such a miserable creature. 

The King survived him some five years. He died in the forty- 
second year of his life, and the twenty-third of his reign. He had 
a very good capacity and some good points, but he was selfish, care- 
less, sensual, and cruel. He was a favourite with the people for 
2l 



514 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

his showy manners ; and the people were a good example to him 
in the constancy of their attachment. He was penitent on his 
death-bed for his " Benevolences," and other extortions, and ordered 
restitution to be made to the people who had sufifered from them. 
He also called about his bed the enriched members of the Woodville 
family, and the proud lords whose honours were of older date, and 
endeavoured to reconcile them, for the sake of the peaceful succes- 
sion of his son and the tranquillity of England. 



CHAPTEE XXIV. 

ENGLAND UNDER EDWAED THE FIFTH. 

The late King's eldest son, the Prince of Wales, called Edward 
after him, was only thirteen years of age at his father's death. 
He was at Ludlow Castle with his uncle, the Earl of Rivers. The 
prince's brother, the Duke of York, only eleven years of age, was 
in London with his mother. The boldest, most crafty, and most 
dreaded nobleman in England at that time was their uncle Richard, 
Duke of Gloucester, and everybody wondered how the two poor 
boys would fare with such an uncle for a friend or a foe. 

The Queen, their mother, being exceedingly uneasy about this, 
was anxious that instructions should be sent to Lord Rivers to 
raise an army to escort the young King safely to London. But, 
Lord Hastings, who was of the Court party opposed to the Wood- 
villes, and who disliked the thought of giving them that power, 
argued against the proposal, and obliged the Queen to be satisfied 
with an escort of two thousand horse. The Duke of Gloucester did 
nothing, at first, to justify suspicion. He came from Scotland 
(where he was commanding an army) to York, and was there the 
first to swear allegiance to his nephew. He then wrote a condoling 
letter to the Queen-Mother, and set off" to be present at the corona- 
tion in London. 

Now, the young King, journeying towards London too, with Lord 
Rivers and Lord Gray, came to Stony Stratford, as his uncle came 
to Northampton, about ten miles distant ; and when those two 
lords heard that the Duke of Gloucester was so near, they proposed 
to the young King that they should go back and greet him in his 
name. The boy being very willing that they should do so, they 
rode off" and were received with great friendliness, and asked by the 
Duke of Gloucester to stay and dine with him. In the evening, 
while they were merry together, up came the Duke of Buckingham 
with three hundred horsemen ; and next morning the two lords and 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 515 

the two dukes, and the three hundred horsemen, rode away to- 
gether to rejoin the King. Just as they were entering Stony Strat- 
ford, the Duke of Gloucester, checking his horse, turned suddenly 
on the two lords, charged them with alienating from him the affec- 
tions of his sweet nephew, and caused them to be arrested by the 
three hundred horsemen and taken back. Then, he and the Duke 
of Buckingham went straight to the King (whom they had now in 
their power), to whom they made a show of kneeling down, and 
offering great love and submission ; and then they ordered his 
attendants to disperse, and took him, alone with them, to North- 
ampton. 

A few days afterwards they conducted him to London, and lodged 
him in the Bishop's Palace. But, he did not remain there long ; for, 
the Duke of Buckingham with a tender face made a speech express- 
ing how anxious he was for the Royal boy's safety, and how much 
safer he would be in the Tower until his coronation, than he could 
be anywhere else. So, to the Tower he was taken, very carefully, 
and the Duke of Gloucester was named Protector of the State. 

Although Gloucester had proceeded thus far with a very smooth 
countenance — and although he was a clever man, fair of speech, and 
not ill-looking, in spite of one of his shoulders being something 
higher than the other — and although he had come into the City 
riding bare-headed at the King's side, and looking very fond of him 
— he had made the King's mother more uneasy yet ; and when 
the Royal boy was taken to the Tower, she became so alarmed that 
she took sanctuaiy in Westminster with her five daughters. 

Nor did she do this without reason, for, the Duke of Gloucester, 
finding that the lords who were opposed to the Woodville family 
were faithful to the young King nevertheless, quickly resolved to 
strike a blow for himself. Accordingly, while those lords met in 
council at the Tower, he and those who were in his interest met in 
separate council at his own residence, Crosby Palace, in Bishops- 
gate Street. Being at last quite prepared, he one day appeared 
unexpectedly at the council in the Tower, and appeared to be very 
jocular and merry. He was particularly gay with the Bishop of Ely : 
praising the strawberries that grew in his garden on Holborn Hill, and 
asking him to have some gathered that he might eat them at dinner. 
The bishop, quite proud of the honour, sent one of his men to fetch 
some ; and the duke, still very jocular and gay, went out ; and the 
council all said what a very agreeable duke he was ! In a little time, 
however, he came back quite altered — not at all jocular — frown- 
ing and fierce — and suddenly said, — 

" What do those persons deserve who have compassed my de- 
struction ; I being the King's lawful, as well as natural, protector ? " 



516 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

To this strange question, Lord Hastings replied, that they de- 
served death, whosoever they were. 

"Then," said the duke, "I tell you that they are that sorceress 
my brother's wife;" meaning the Queen : "and that other sorcer- 
ess, Jane Shore. Who, by witchcraft, have withered my body, and 
caused my arm to shrink as I now show you." 

He then pulled up his sleeve and showed them his arm, which 
was shrunken, it is true, but which had been so, as they all very 
well knew, from the hour of his birth. 

Jane Shore, being then the lover of Lord Hastings, as she had 
formerly been of the late King, that lord knew that he himself was 
attacked. So, he said, in some confusion, " Certainly, my Lord, if 
they have done this, they be worthy of punishment." 

" If? " said the Duke of Gloucester ; " do you talk to me of ifs ? 
I tell you that they have so done, and I will make it good upon 
thy body, thou traitor ! " 

With that, he struck the table a great blow with his fist. This 
was a signal to some of his people outside to cry " Treason ! " 
They immediately did so, and there was a rush into the chamber 
of so many armed men that it was filled in a moment. 

" First," said the Duke of Gloucester to Lord Hastings, " I arrest 
thee, traitor ! And let him," he added to the armed men who took 
him, " have a priest at once, for by Saint Paul I will not dine until 
I have seen his head off ! " 

Lord Hastings was hurried to the green by the Tower chapel, 
and there beheaded on a log of wood that happened to be lying on 
the ground. Then, the duke dined with a good appetite, and after 
dinner summoning the principal citizens to attend him, told them 
that Lord Hastings and the rest had designed to murder both him- 
self and the Duke of Buckingham, who stood by his side, if he had 
not providentially discovered their design. He requested them to 
be so obliging as to inform their fellow-citizens of the truth of what 
he said, and issued a proclamation (prepared and neatly copied out 
beforehand) to the same effect. 

On the same day that the duke did these things in the Tower, 
Sir Richard Ratcliffe, the boldest and most undaunted of his men, 
went down to Pontefract ; arrested Lord Rivers, Lord Gray, and two 
other gentlemen ; and publicly executed them on the scaffold, with- 
out any trial, for having intended the duke's death. Three days 
afterwards the duke, not to lose time, went down the river to West- 
minster in his barge, attended by divers bishops, lords, and soldiers, 
and demanded that the Queen should deliver her second son, the 
Duke of York, into his safe keeping. The Queen, being obliged to 
comply, resigned the child after she had wej^t over him ; and Rich- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 517 

ard of Gloucester placed him with his brother in the Tower. Then, 
he seized Jane Shore, and, because she had been the lover of the late 
King, confiscated her property, and got her sentenced to do public 
penance in the streets by walking in a scanty dress, with bare feet, 
and carrying a lighted candle, to Saint Paul's Cathedral, through 
the most crowded part of the City. 

Having now all things ready for his own advancement, he caused 
a friar to preach a sermon at the cross which stood in front of Saint 
Paul's Cathedral, in which he dwelt upon the profligate manners 
of the late King, and upon the late shame of Jane Shore, and hinted 
that the princes were not his children. " Whereas, good people," 
said the friar, whose name was Sha.w, "my Lord the Protector, the 
noble Duke of Gloucester, that sweet prince, the pattern of all the no- 
blest virtues, is the perfect image and express likeness of his father." 
There had been a little plot between the duke and the friar, that 
the duke should appear in the crowd at this moment, when it was 
expected that the people would cry "Long live King Richard!" 
But, either through the friar saying the words too soon, or through 
the duke's coming too late, the duke and the words did not come 
together, and the people only laughed, and the friar sneaked off 
ashamed. 

The Duke of Buckingham was a better hand at such business 
than the friar, so he went to the Guildhall the next day, and ad- 
dressed the citizens in the Lord Protector's behalf. A few dirty 
men, who had been hired and stationed there for the purpose, cry- 
ing when he had done, " God save King Richard ! " he made them 
a great bow, and thanked them with all his heart. Next day, to 
make an end of it, he went with the mayor and some lords and 
citizens to Bayard Castle, by the river, where Richard then was, 
and read an address, humbly entreating him to accept the Crown 
of England. Richard, who looked down upon them out of a win- 
dow and pretended to be in great uneasiness and alarm, assured 
them there was nothing he desired less, and that his deep affection 
for his nephews forbade him to think of it. .To this the Duke of 
Buckingham replied, ^T.th pretended warmth, that the free people 
of England would never submit to his nephew's rule, and that if 
Richard, who was the lawful heir, refused the Crown, why then 
they must find some one else to wear it. The Duke of Gloucester 
returned, that since he used that strong language, it became his 
painful duty to think no more of himself, and to accept the Crown. 

Upon that, the people cheered and dispersed ; and the Duke of 
Gloucester and the Duke of Buckingham passed a pleasant evening, 
talking over the play they had just acted with so much success, 
and every word of which they had prepared together. 



518 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

CHAPTER XXV. 

ENGLAND UNDER RICHARD THE THIRD. 

King Richard the Third was up betimes in the morning, 
and went to Westminster Hall. In the Hall was a marble seat, 
upon which he sat himself down between two great noblemen, and 
told the people that he began the new reign in that place, because 
the first duty of a sovereign was to administer the laws equally to 
all, and to maintain justice. He then mounted his horse and rode 
back to the City, where he was received by the clergy and the 
crowd as if he really had a right to the throne, and really were a 
just man. The clergy and the crowd must have been rather 
ashamed of themselves in secret, I think, for being such poor- 
spirited knaves. 

The new King and his Queen were soon crowned with a great 
deal of show and noise, which the people liked very much ; and 
then the King set forth on a royal progress through his dominions. 
He was crowned a second time at York, in order that the people 
might have show and noise enough ; and wherever he went was 
received with shouts of rejoicing — from a good many people of 
strong lungs, who were paid to strain their throats in crying, " God 
save King Richard ! " The plan was so successful that I am told 
it has been imitated since, by other usurpers, in other progresses 
through other dominions. 

While he was on this journey, King Richard stayed a week at 
Warwick. And from Warwick he sent instructions home for one 
of the wickedest murders that ever w^as done — the murder of the 
two young princes, his nephews, who were shut up in the Tower of 
London. 

Sir Robert Brackenbury was at that time Governor of the 
Tower. To him, by the hands of a messenger named John 
Green, did King Richard send a letter, ordering him by some 
means to put the two young princes to death. But Sir Robert — 
I hope because he had children of his own, and loved them — sent 
John Green back again, riding and spurring along the dusty roads, 
with the answer that he could not do so horrible a piece of work. 
The King, having frowningly considered a little, called to him Sir 
James Tyrrel, his master of the horse, and to him gave author- 
ity to take command of the Tower, whenever he would, for twenty- 
four hours, and to keep all the keys of the Tower during that 
space of time. Tyrrel, well knowing what was wanted, looked 
about him for two hardened ruffians, and chose John Dighton, 
one of his own grooms, and Miles Forest, who was a murderer 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 519 

by trade. Having secured these two assistants, he went, upon a 
day in August, to the Tower, showed his authority from the King, 
took the command for four-and-twenty hours, and obtained pos- 
session of the keys. And when the black night came, he went 
creeping, creeping, like a guilty villain as he was, up the dark stone 
winding stairs, and along the dark stone passages, until he came to 
the door of the room where the two young princes, having said 
their prayers, lay fast asleep, clasped in each other's arms. And 
while he watched and listened at the door, he sent in those evil 
demons, John Dighton and Miles Forest, who smothered the two 
princes with the bed and pillows, and carried their bodies down 
the stairs, and buried them under a great heap of stones at the 
staircase foot. And when the day came, he gave up the command 
of the Tower, and restored the keys, and hurried away without 
once looking behind him ; and Sir Robert Brackenbury went with 
fear and sadness to the princes' room, and found the princes gone 
for ever. 

You know, through all this history, how true it is that traitors 
are never true, and you will not be surprised to learn that the 
Duke of Buckingham soon turned against King Richard, and joined 
a great conspiracy that was formed to dethrone him, and to place 
the crown upon its rightful owner's head. Richard had meant to 
keep the murder secret ; but when he heard through his spies that 
this conspiracy existed, and that many lords and gentlemen drank 
in secret to the healths of the two young princes in the Tower, he 
made it known that they were dead. The conspirators, though 
thwarted for a moment, soon resolved to set up for the crown 
against the murderous Richard, Henry Earl of Richmond, grand- 
son of Catherine : that widow of Henry the Fifth who married 
Owen Tudpr. And as Henry was of the house of Lancaster, they 
proposed that he should marry the Princess Elizabeth, the eldest 
daughter of the late King, now the heiress of the house of York, 
and thus by uniting the rival families put an end to the fatal wars 
of the Red and White Roses. All being settled, a time was ap- 
pointed for Henry to come over from Brittany, and for a great ris- 
ing against Richard to take place in several parts of England at 
the same hour. On a certain day, therefore, in October, the revolt 
took place ; but unsuccessfully. Richard was prepared, Henry 
was driven back at sea by a storm, his follow^ers in England were 
dispersed, and the Duke of Buckingham was taken, and at once 
beheaded in the market-place at Salisbury. 

The time of his success was a good time, Richard thought, for 
summoning a Parliament and getting some money. So, a Parlia- 
ment was called, and it flattered and fawned upon him as much as 



520 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

he could possibly desire, and declared him to be the rightful King 
of England, and his only son Edward, then eleven years of age, 
the next heir to the throne. 

Kichard knew full well that, let the Parliament say what it 
would, the Princess Elizabeth was remembered by people as the 
heiress of the house of York ; and having accurate information be- 
sides, of its being designed by the conspirators to marry her to 
Henry of Richmond, he felt that it would much strengthen him 
and weaken them, to be beforehand with them, and marry her to 
his son. With this view he went to the Sanctuary at Westminster, 
where the late King's widow and daughter still were, and besought 
them to come to Court : where (he swore by anything and every- 
thing) they should be safely and honourably entertained. They 
came, accordingly, but had scarcely been at Court a month when 
his son died suddenly — or was poisoned — and his plan was crushed 
to pieces. 

In this extremity, King Richard, always active, thought, "I 
must make another plan." And he made the plan of marrying the 
Princess Elizabeth himself, although she was his niece. There 
was one difficulty in the way : his wife, the Queen Anne, was alive. 
But, he knew (remembering his nephews) how to remove that 
obstacle, and he made love to the Princess Elizabeth, telling her he 
felt perfectly confident that the Queen would die in February. 
The Princess was not a very scrupulous young lady, for, instead of 
rejecting the murderer of her brothers with scorn and hatred, she 
openly declared she loved him dearly ; and, when February came 
and the Queen did not die, she expressed her impatient opinion 
that she was too long about it. However, King Richard was not 
so far out in his prediction, but that she died in March — he took 
good care of that — and then this precious pair hoped to be mar- 
ried. But they were disappointed, for the idea of such a marriage 
was so unpopular in the country, that the King's chief counsellors, 
Ratcliffe and Catesby, would by no means undertake to propose 
it, and the King was even obliged to declare in public that he had 
never thought of such a thing. 

He was, by this time, dreaded and hated by all classes of his 
subjects. His nobles deserted every day to Henry's side; he 
dared not call another Parliament, lest his crimes should be de- 
nounced there ; and for want of money, he was obliged to get Be- 
nevolences from the citizens, which exasperated them all against 
him. It was said too, that, being stricken by his conscience, he 
dreamed frightful dreams, and started up in the night-time, wild 
with terror and remorse. Active to the last, through all this, he 
issued vigorous proclamations against Henry of Richmond and aU 



A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 521 

his followers, when he heard that they were coming against him 
with a Fleet from France ; and took the field as fierce and savage 
as a wild boar — the animal represented on his shield. 

Henry of Richmond landed with six thousand men at Milford 
Haven, and came on against King Richard, then encamped at 
Leicester with an army twice as great, through North Wales. 
On Bosworth Field the two armies met; and Richard, looking 
along Henry's ranks, and seeing them crowded with the English 
nobles who had abandoned him, turned pale when he beheld the 
powerful Lord Stanley and his son (whom he had tried hard to re- 
tain) among them. But, he was as brave as he was wicked, and 
plunged into the thickest of the fight. He was riding hither and 
thither, laying about him in all directions, when he observed the 
Earl of Northumberland — one of his few great allies — to stand 
inactive, and the main body of his troops to hesitate. At the 
same moment, his desperate glance caught Henry of Richmond 
among a little group of his knights. Riding hard at him, and cry- 
ing " Treason ! " he killed his standard-bearer, fiercely unhorsed 
another gentleman, and aimed a powerful stroke at Henry himself, 
to cut him down. But, Sir William Stanley parried it as it fell, 
and before Richard could raise his arm again, he was borne down 
in a press of numbers, unhorsed, and killed. Lord Stanley picked 
up the crown, all bruised and trampled, and stained with blood, 
and put it upon Richmond's head, amid loud and rejoicing cries of 
" Long live King Henry ! " 

That night, a horse was led up to the church of the G-rey Friars 
at Leicester; across whose back was tied, like some worthless 
sack, a naked body brought there for burial. It was the body 
of the last of the Plantagenet line. King Richard the Third, 
usurper and murderer, slain at the battle of Bosworth Field in the 
thirty-second year of his age, after a reign of two years. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

ENGLAND UNDER HENEY THE SEVENTH. 

King Heney the Seventh did not turn out to be as fine a 
fellow as the nobility and people hoped, in the first joy of their 
deliverance from Richard the Third. He was very cold, crafty, 
and calculating, and would do almost anything for money. He 
possessed considerable ability, but his chief merit appears to have 
been that he was not cruel when there was nothing to be got 
by it. 



522 A CHILD'S HISTOEY OF ENGLAND. 

The new King had promised the nobles who had espoused his 
cause that he would marry the Princess Elizabeth. The first thing 
he did, was, to direct her to be removed from the castle of Sheriff 
Hutton in Yorkshire, where Richard had placed her, and restored 
to the care of her mother in London. The young Earl of War- 
wick, Edward Plantagenet, son and heir of the late Duke of Clar- 
ence, had been kept a prisoner in the same old Yorkshire Castle 
with her. This boy, who was now fifteen, the new King placed 
in the Tower for safety. Then he came to London in great state, 
and gratified the people with a fine procession ; on which kind of 
show he often very much relied for keeping them in good humour. 
The sports and feasts which took place were followed by a terrible 
fever, called the Sweating Sickness ; of which great numbers of 
people died. Lord Mayors and Aldermen are thought to have 
suffered most from it ; whether, because they were in the habit 
of over-eating themselves, or because they were very jealous of 
preserving filth and nuisances in the City (as they have been since), 
I don't know. 

The King's coronation was postponed on account of the general 
ill-health, and he afterwards deferred his marriage, as if he were 
not very anxious that it should take place : and, even after that, 
deferred the Queen's coronation so long that he gave offence to the 
York party. However, he set these things right in the end, by 
hanging some men and seizing on the rich possessions of others ; 
by granting more popular pardons to the followers of the late King 
than could, at first, be got from him ; and, by employing about 
his Court, some not very scrupulous persons who had been em- 
ployed in the previous reign. 

As this reign was principally remarkable for two very curious 
impostures which have become famous in history, we will make 
those two stories its principal feature. 

There was a priest at Oxford of the name of Simons, who had 
for a pupil a handsome boy named Lambert Simnel, the son of 
a baker. Partly to gratify his own ambitious ends, and partly to 
carry out the designs of a secret party formed against the King, this 
priest declared that his pupil, the boy, was no other than the young 
Earl of Warwick; who (as everybody might have known) was 
safely locked up in the Tower of London. The priest and the boy 
went over to Ireland ; and, at Dublin, enlisted in their cause all 
ranks of the people : who seem to have been generous enough, but 
exceedingly irrational. The Earl of Kildare, the governor of Ire- 
land, declared that he believed the boy to be what the priest repre- 
sented ; and the boy, who had been well tutored by the priest, told 
them such things of his childhood, and gave them so many descrip- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 523 

tions of the Royal Family, that they were perpetually shouting and 
hurrahing, and drinking his health, and making all kinds of noisy 
and thirsty demonstrations, to express their belief in him. Kor 
was this feeling confined to Ireland alone, for the Earl of Lincoln 

— whom the late usurper had named as his successor — went over 
to the young Pretender ; and, after holding a secret correspondence 
with the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy — the sister of Edward 
the Fourth, who detested the present King and all his race — sailed 
to Dublin with two thousand German soldiers of her providing. 
In this promising state of the boy's fortunes, he was crowned there, 
with a crown taken oft' the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary ; 
and was then, according to the Irish custom of those days, carried 
home on the shoulders of a big chieftain possessing a great deal 
more strength than sense. Father Simons, you may be sure, was 
mighty busy at the coronation. 

Ten days afterwards, the Germans, and the Irish, and the priest, 
and the boy, and the Earl of Lincoln, all landed in Lancashire to 
invade England. The King, who had good intelligence of their 
movements, set up his standard at Nottingham, where vast num- 
bers resorted to him every day ; while the Earl of Lincoln could 
gain but very few. With his small force he tried to make for the 
town of Newark ; but the King's army getting between him and 
that place, he had no choice but to risk a battle at Stoke. It soon 
ended in the complete destruction of the Pretender's forces, one half 
of whom were killed ; among them, the earl himself. The priest 
and the baker's boy were taken prisoners. The priest, after con- 
fessing the trick, was shut up in prison, where he afterwards died 

— suddenly perhaps. The boy was taken into the King's kitchen 
and made a turnspit. He was afterwards raised to the station of 
one of the King's falconers ; and so ended this strange imposition. 

There seems reason to suspect that the Dowager Queen — always 
a restless and busy woman — had had some share in tutoring the 
baker's son. The King was very angry with her, whether or no. 
He seized upon her property, and shut her up in a convent at Ber- 
mondsey. 

One might suppose that the end of this story would have put the 
Irish people on their guard ; but they were quite ready to receive a 
second impostor, as they had received the first, and that same 
troublesome Duchess of Burgundy soon gave them the opportunity. 
All of a sudden there appeared at Cork, in a vessel arriving from 
Portugal, a young man of excellent abilities, of very handsome 
appearance and most winning manners, who declared himself to be 
Richard, Duke of York, the second son of King Edward the Fourth. 
"0," said some, even of those ready Irish believers, "but surely 



524 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

that young Prince was murdered by his uncle in the Tower ! " — "It 
is supposed so," said the engaging young man ; " and my brother 
was killed in that gloomy prison ; but I escaped — it don't matter 
how, at present — and have been wandering about the world for 
seven long years." This explanation being quite satisfactory to 
numbers of the Irish people, they began again to shout and to hur- 
rah, and to drink his health, and to make the noisy and thirsty 
demonstrations all over again. And the big chieftain in Dublin 
began to look out for another coronation, and another young King 
to be carried home on his back. 

Now, King Henry being then on bad terms with France, the 
French King, Charles the Eighth, saw that, by pretending to be- 
lieve in the handsome young man, he could trouble his enemy sorely. 
So, he invited him over to the French Court, and appointed him a 
body-guard, and treated him in aU respects as if he really were the 
Duke of York. Peace, however, being soon concluded between the 
two Kings, the pretended duke was turned adrift, and wandered 
for protection to the Duchess of Burgundy. She, after feigning to 
inquire into the reality of his claims, declared him to be the very 
picture of her dear departed brother ; gave him a body-guard at her 
Court, of thirty halberdiers ; and called him by the sounding name 
of the White Rose of England. 

The leading members of the White Rose party in England sent 
over an agent, named Sir Robert Clifford, to ascertain whether the 
White Rose's claims were good : the King also sent over his agents 
to inquire into the Rose's history. The White Roses declared the 
young man to be really the Duke of York; the King declared him to 
be Perkin Warbeck, the son of a merchant of the city of Tournay, 
who had acquired his knowledge of England, its language and man- 
ners, from the English merchants who traded in Flanders ; it was also 
stated by the Royal agents that he had been in the service of Lady 
Brompton, the wife of an exiled English nobleman, and that the 
Duchess of Burgundy had caused him to be trained and taught, 
expressly for this deception. The King then required the Arch- 
duke Philip — who was the sovereign of Burgundy — to banish this 
new Pretender, or to deliver him up ; but, as the archduke replied 
that he could not control the duchess in her own land, the King, 
in revenge, took the market of English cloth away from Antwerp, 
and prevented all commercial intercourse between the two countries. 

He also, by arts and bribes, prevailed on Sir Robert Clifford to 
betray his employers ; and he denouncing several famous English 
noblemen as being secretly the friends of Perkin Warbeck, the King 
had three of the foremost executed at once. Whether he pardoned 
the remainder because they were poor, I do not know ; but it is 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 525 

only too probable that he refused to pardon one famous nobleman 
against whom the same Clifford soon afterwards informed separately, 
because he was rich. This was no other than Sir William Stanley, 
who had saved the Kijag's life at the battle of Bosworth Field. It 
is very doubtful whether his treason amounted to much more than 
his having said, that if he were sure the young man was the Duke 
of York, he would not take arms against him. Whatever he had 
done he admitted, like an honourable spirit ; and he lost his head 
for it, and the covetous King gained all his wealth. 

Perkin Warbeck kept quiet for three years ; but, as the Flemings 
began to complain heavily of the loss of their trade by the stoppage 
of the Antwerp market on his account, and as it was not unlikely 
that they might even go so far as to take his life, or give him up, 
he found it necessary to do something. Accordingly he made a 
desperate sally, and landed, with only a few hundred men, on the 
coast of Deal. But he was soon glad to get back to the place from 
whence he came ; for the country people rose against his followers, 
killed a great many, and took a hundred and fifty prisoners : who 
were all driven to London, tied together with ropes, like a team of 
cattle. Every one of them was hanged on some part or other of 
the sea-shore ; in order, that if any more men should come over 
with Perkin Warbeck, they might see the bodies as a warning 
before they landed. 

Then the wary King, by making a treaty of commerce with the 
Flemings, drove Perkin Warbeck out of that country ; and, by 
completely gaining over the Irish to his side, deprived him of that 
asylum too. He wandered away to Scotland, and told his story at 
that Court. King James the Fourth of Scotland, who was no 
friend to King Henry, and had no reason to be (for King Henry 
had bribed his Scotch lords to betray him more than once ; but 
had never succeeded in his plots), gave him a great reception, called 
him his cousin, and gave him in marriage the Lady Catherine Gor- 
don, a beautiful and charming creature related to the royal house 
of Stuart. 

Alarmed by this successful reappearance of the Pretender, the 
King still undermined, and bought, and bribed, and kept his doings 
and Perkin Warbeck's story in the dark, when he might, one would 
imagine, have rendered the matter clear to all England. But, for 
all this bribing of the Scotch lords at the Scotch King's Court, he 
could not procure the Pretender to be delivered up to him. James, 
though not very particular in many respects, would not betray him ; 
and the ever-busy Duchess of Burgundy so provided him with arms, 
and good soldiers, and with money besides, that he had soon a little 
army of fifteen hundred men of various nations. With these, and 



526 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

aided by the Scottish King in person, he crossed the border into 
England, and niade a proclamation to the people, in which he called 
the King " Henry Tudor " ; offered large rewards to any who should 
take or distress him ; and announced himself as King Eichard the 
Fourth come to receive the homage of his faithful subjects. His 
faithful subjects, however, cared nothing for him, and hated his 
faithful troops : who, being of different nations, quarrelled also 
among themselves. Worse than this, if worse were possible, they 
began to plunder the country ; upon which the White Rose said, 
that he would rather lose his rights, than gain them through the 
miseries of the English people. The Scottish King made a jest 
of his scruples ; but they and their whole force went back again 
without fighting a battle. 

The worst consequence of this attempt was, that a rising took 
place among the people of Cornwall, who considered themselves 
too heavily taxed to meet the charges of the expected war. Stim- 
ulated by Flammock, a lawyer, and Joseph, a blacksmith, and joined 
by Lord Audley and some other country gentlemen, they marched 
on all the way to Deptford Bridge, where they fought a battle with 
the King's army. They were defeated — though the Cornish men 
fought with great bravery — and the lord was beheaded, and the 
lawyer and the blacksmith were hanged, drawn, and quartered. 
The rest were pardoned. The King, who believed every man to 
be as avaricious as himself, and thought that money could settle 
anything, allowed them to make bargains for their liberty with the 
soldiers who had taken them. 

Perkin Warbeck, doomed to wander up and down, and never to 
find rest anywhere — a sad fate : almost a sufficient punishment 
for an imposture, which he seems in time to have half believed 
himself — lost his Scottish refuge through a truce being made be- 
tween the two Kings ; and found himself, once more, without a 
country before him in which he could lay his head. But James 
(always honourable and true to him, alike when he melted down 
his plate, and even the great gold chain he had been used to wear, 
to pay soldiers in his cause ; and now, when that cause was lost 
and hopeless) did not conclude the treaty, until he had safely de- 
parted out of the Scottish dominions. He, and his beautiful wife, 
who was faithful to him under all reverses, and left her state and 
home to follow his poor fortunes, were put aboard ship with every- 
thing necessary for their comfort and protection, and sailed for 
Ireland. 

But, the Irish people had had enough of counterfeit Earls of 
Warwick and Dukes of York, for one while ; and would give the 
White Rose no aid. So, the White Rose — encircled by thorns 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 527 

indeed — resolved to go with his beautiful wife to Cornwall as a 
forlorn resource, and see what might be made of the Cornish men, 
who had risen so valiantly a little while before, and who had fought 
so bravely at Deptford Bridge. 

To Whitsand Bay, in Cornwall, accordingly, came Perkin War- 
beck and his wife ; and the lovely lady he shut up for safety in 
the Castle of Saint Michael's Mount, and then marched into Devon- 
shire at the head of three thousand Cornish men. These were 
increased to six thousand by the time of his arrival in Exeter; 
but, there the people made a stout resistance, and he went on to 
Taunton, where he came in sight of the King's army. The stout 
Cornish men, although they were few in number, and badly armed, 
were so bold, that they never thought of retreating ; but bravely 
looked forward to a battle on the morrow. Unhappily for them, 
the man who was possessed of so many engaging qualities, and 
who attracted so many people to his side when he had nothing else 
with which to tempt them, was not as brave as they. In the 
night, when the two armies lay opposite to each other, he mounted 
a swift horse and fled. When morning dawned, the poor confiding 
Cornish men, discovering that they had no leader, surrendered to 
the King's power. Some of them were hanged, and the rest were 
pardoned and went miserably home. 

Before the King pursued Perkin Warbeck to the sanctuary of 
Beaulieu in the New Forest, where it was soon known that he had 
taken refuge, he sent a body of horsemen to Saint Michael's Mount, 
to seize his wife. She was soon taken and brought as a captive 
before the King. But she was so beautiful, and so good, and so 
devoted to the man in whom she believed, that the King regarded 
her with compassion, treated her with great respect, and placed 
her at Court, near the Queen's person. And many years after Per- 
kin Warbeck was no more, and when his strange story had become 
like a nursery tale, she was called the White Eose, by the people, 
in remembrance of her beauty. 

The sanctuary at Beaulieu was soon surrounded by the King's 
men ; and the King, pursuing his usual dark artful ways, sent 
pretended friends to Perkin Warbeck to persuade him to come out 
and surrender himself This he soon did ; the King having taken 
a good look at the man of whom he had heard so much — from 
behind a screen — directed him to be well mounted, and to ride 
behind him at a little distance, guarded, but not bound in any 
way. So they entered London with the King's favourite show — 
a procession ; and some of the people hooted as the Pretender rode 
slowly through the streets to the Tower ; but the greater part were 
quiet, and very curious to see him. From the Tower, he was taken 



528 A CHILD'S HISTORY OE ENGLAND. 

to the Palace at Westminster, and there lodged like a gentleman, 
though closely watched. He was examined every now and then 
as to his imposture ; but the King was so secret in all he did, that 
even then he gave it a consequence, which it cannot be supposed 
to have in itself deserved. 

At last Perkin Warbeck ran away, and took refuge in another 
sanctuary near Richmond in Surrey. From this he was again per- 
suaded to deliver himself up ; and, being conveyed to London, he 
stood in the stocks for a whole day, outside Westminster Hall, and 
there read a paper purporting to be his full confession, and relating 
his history as the King's agents had originally described it. He 
was then shut up in the Tower again, in the company of the Earl of 
Warwick, who had now been there for fourteen years : ever since 
his removal out of Yorkshire, except when the King had had him 
at Court, and had shown him to the people, to prove the imposture 
of the Baker's boy. It is but too probable, when we consider the 
crafty character of Henry the Seventh, that these two were brought 
together for a cruel purpose. A plot was soon discovered between 
them and the keepers, to murder the Governor, get possession of 
the keys, and proclaim Perkin Warbeck as King Richard the 
Fourth. That there was some such plot, is likely; that they 
were tempted into it, is at least as likely ; that the unfortunate 
Earl of Warwick — last male of the Plantagenet line — was 
too unused to the world, and too ignorant and simple to know 
much about it, whatever it was, is perfectly certain ; and that it 
was the King's interest to get rid of him, is no less so. He was 
beheaded on Tower Hill, and Perkin Warbeck was hanged at 
Tyburn. 

Such was the end of the pretended Duke of York, whose shad- 
owy history was made more shadowy — and ever will be — by the 
mystery and craft of the King. If he had turned his great natural 
advantages to a more honest account, he might have lived a happy 
and respected life, even in those days. But he died upon a gal- 
lows at Tyburn, leaving the Scottish lady, who had loved him so 
well, kindly protected at the Queen's Court. After some time she 
forgot her old loves and troubles, as many people do with Time's 
merciful assistance, and married a Welsh gentleman. Her second 
husband, Sir Matthew Cradoc, more honest and more happy 
than her first, lies beside her in a tomb in the old church of 
Swansea. 

The ill-blood between France and England in this reign, arose 
out of the continued plotting of the Duchess of Burgundy, and dis- 
putes respecting the affairs of Brittany. The King feigned to be 
very patriotic, indignant, and warlike ; but he always contrived so 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 529 

as never to make war in reality, and always to make money. His 
taxation of the people, on pretence of war with France, involved, 
at one time, a very dangerous insurrection, headed by Sir John 
Egremont, and a common man called John k Chambre. But it 
was subdued by the royal forces, under the command of the Earl 
of Surrey. The knighted John escaped to the Duchess of Bur- 
gundy, who was ever ready to receive any one who gave the King 
trouble ; and the plain John was hanged at York, in the midst of 
a number of his men, but on a much higher gibbet, as being a 
greater traitor. Hung high or hung low, however, hanging is 
much the same to the person hung. 

Within a year after her marriage, the Queen had given birth 
to a son, who was called Prince Arthur, in remembrance of the old 
British prince of romance and story; and who, when all these 
events had happened, being then in his fifteenth year, was married 
to Catherine, the daughter of the Spanish monarch, with great 
rejoicings and bright prospects ; but in a very few months he 
sickened and died. As soon as the King had recovered from his 
grief, he thought it a pity that the fortune of the Spanish Princess, 
amounting to two hundred thousand crowns, should go out of the 
family ; and therefore arranged that the young widow should marry 
his second son Henry, then twelve years of age, when he too 
should be fifteen. There were objections to this marriage on the 
part of the clergy ; but, as the infallible Pope was gained over, and, 
as he micst be right, that settled the business for the time. The 
King's eldest daughter was provided for, and a long course of dis- 
turbance was considered to be set at rest, by her being married to 
the Scottish King. 

And now the Queen died. When the King had got over that 
grief too, his mind once more reverted to his darling money for 
consolation, and he thought of marrying the Dowager Queen of 
Naples, who was immensely rich : but, as it turned out not to be 
practicable to gain the money however practicable it might have 
been to gain the lady, he gave up the idea. He was not so fond 
of her but that he soon proposed to marry the Dowager Duchess 
of Savoy ; and, soon afterwards, the widow of the King of Castile, 
who was raving mad. But he made a money-bargain instead, and 
married neither. 

The Duchess of Burgundy, among the other discontented people 
to whom she had given refuge, had sheltered Edmund de la Pole 
(younger brother of that Earl of Lincoln who was killed at Stoke), 
now Earl of Suffolk. The King had prevailed upon him to return 
to the marriage of Prince Arthur ; but, he soon afterwards went 
away again ; and then the King, suspecting a conspiracy, resorted 
2 M 



530 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

to his favourite plan of sending him some treacherous friends, and 
buying of those scoundrels the secrets they disclosed or invented. 
Some arrests and executions took place in consequence. In the 
end, the King, on a promise of not taking his life, obtained pos- 
session of the person of Edmund de la Pole, and shut him up in 
the Tower. 

This was his last enemy. If he had lived much longer he 
would have made many more among the people, by the grinding 
exaction to which he constantly exposed them, and by the tyranni- 
cal acts of his two prime favourites in all money-raising matters, 
Edmund Dudley and Richakd Empson. But Death — the 
enemy who is not to be bought off or deceived, and on whom no 
money, and no treachery, has any effect — presented himself at this 
juncture, and ended the King's reign. He died of the gout, on the 
twenty-second of April, one thousand five hundred and nine, and in 
the fifty-third year of his age, after reigning twenty-four years ; he 
was buried in the beautiful Chapel of Westminster Abbey, which 
he had himself founded, and which still bears his name. 

It was in this reign that the great Christopher Columbus, on 
behalf of Spain, discovered what was then called The New World. 
G-reat wonder, interest, and hope of wealth being awakened in 
England thereby, the King and the merchants of London and Bris- 
tol fitted out an English expedition for further discoveries in the 
New World, and entrusted it to Sebastian Cabot, of Bristol, the 
son of a Venetian pilot there. He was very successful in his voy- 
age, and gained high reputation, both for himself and England. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

england under henry the eighth, called bluff king hal 
and burly king harry. 

Part the First. 

We now come to King Henry the Eighth, whom it has been too 
much the fashion to call "Bluff King Hal," and "Burly King 
Harry," and other fine names; but whom I shall take the liberty 
to call, plainly, one of the most detestable villains that ever drew 
breath. You will be able to judge, long before we come to the 
end of his life, whether he deserves the character. 

He was just eighteen years of age when he came to the throne. 
People said he was handsome then ; but I don't believe it. He 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 531 

was a big, burly, noisy, small-eyed, large-faced, double-chinned, 
swinish-looking fellow in later life (as we know from the likenesses 
of him, painted by the famous Hans Holbein), and it is not easy 
to believe that so bad a character can ever have been veiled under 
a prepossessing appearance. 

He was anxious to make himself popular; and the people, who had 
long disliked the late King, were very willing to believe that he de- 
served to be so. He was extremely fond of show and display, and 
so were they. Therefore there was great rejoicing when he married 
the Princess Catherine, and when they were both crowned. And 
the King fought at tournaments and always came off victorious — 
for the courtiers took care of that — and there was a general out- 
cry that he was a wonderful man. Empson, Dudley, and their 
supporters were accused of a variety of crimes they had never com- 
mitted, instead of the offences of which they really had been guilty ; 
and they were pilloried, and set upon horses with their faces to the 
tails, and knocked about and beheaded, to the satisfaction of the 
people, and the enrichment of the King. 

The Pope, so indefatigable in getting the world into trouble, had 
mixed himself up in a war on the continent of Europe, occa- 
sioned by the reigning Princes of little quarrelling states in Italy 
having at various times married into other Royal families, and so led 
to theiy- claiming a share in those petty Governments. The King, 
who discovered that he was very fond of the Pope, sent a herald to 
the King of France, to say that he must not make war upon that 
holy personage, because he was the father of all Christians. As 
the French King did not mind this relationship in the least, and 
also refused to admit a claim King Henry made to certain lands in 
France, war was declared between the two countries. N"ot to per- 
plex this story with an account of the tricks and designs of all the 
sovereigns who were engaged in it, it is enough to say that England 
made a blundering alliance with Spain, and got stupidly taken in 
by that country ; which made its own terms with France when it 
could, and left England in the lurch. Sir Edward Howard, a 
bold admiral, son of the Earl of Surrey, distinguished himself by 
his bravery against the French in this business ; but, unfortunately, 
he was more brave than wise, for, skimming into the French har- 
bour of Brest with only a few row-boats, he attempted (in revenge 
for the defeat and death of Sir Thomas Knyvett, another bold 
English admiral) to take some strong French ships, well defended 
with batteries of cannon. The upshot was, that he was left on board 
of one of them (in consequence of it shooting away from his own 
boat), with not more than about a dozen men, and was thrown into 
the sea and drowned : though not until he had taken from his 



532 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

breast his gold chain and gold whistle, which were the signs of his 
office, and had cast them into the sea to prevent their being made 
a boast of by the enemy. After this defeat — which was a great 
one, for Sir Edward Howard was a man of valour and fame — the 
King took it into his head to invade France in person ; first execut- 
ing that dangerous Earl of Suffolk whom his father had left in the 
Tower, and appointing Queen Catherine to the charge of his king- 
dom in his absence. He sailed to Calais, where he was joined by 
Maximilian, Emperor of Germany, who pretended to be his soldier, 
and who took pay in his service : with a good deal of nonsense of 
that sort, flattering enough to the vanity of a vain blusterer. The 
King might be successful enough in sham fights ; but his idea of 
real battles chiefly consisted in pitching silken tents of bright colours 
that were ignominiously blown down by the wind, and in making a 
vast display of gaudy flags and golden curtains. Fortune, however, 
favoured him better than he deserved; for, after much waste of 
time in tent pitching, flag flying, gold curtaining, and other such 
masquerading, he gave the French battle at a place called Guine- 
gate : where they took such an unaccountable panic, and fled with 
such swiftness, that it was ever afterwards called by the English 
the Battle of Spurs. Instead of following up his advantage, the 
King, finding that he had had enough of real fighting, came home 
again. 

The Scottish King, though nearly related to Henry by marriage, 
had taken part against him in this war. The Earl of Surrey, as 
the English general, advanced to meet him when he came out of his 
own dominions and crossed the river Tweed. The two armies came 
up with one another when the Scottish King had also crossed the 
river Till, and was encamped upon the last of the Cheviot Hills, 
called the Hill of Flodden. Along the plain below it, the English, 
when the hour of battle came, advanced. The Scottish army, which 
had been drawn up in five great bodies, then came steadily down in 
perfect silence. So they, in their turn, advanced to meet the Eng- 
lish army, which came on in one long line ; and they attacked it 
with a body of spearmen, under Lord Home. At first they had 
the best of it ; but the English recovered themselves so bravely, 
and fought with such valour, that, when the Scottish King had 
almost made his way up to the Royal standard, he was slain, and 
the whole Scottish power routed. Ten thousand Scottish men lay 
dead that day on Flodden Field ; and among them, numbers of the 
nobility and gentry. For a long time afterwards, the Scottish peas- 
antry used to believe that their King had not been really killed in 
this battle, because no Englishman had found an iron belt he wore 
about his body as a penance for having been an unnatural and un- 



A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 533 

dutiful son. But, whatever became of his belt, the English had 
his sword and dagger, and the ring from his finger, and his body 
too, covered with wounds. There is no doubt of it; for it was 
seen and recognised by English gentlemen who had known the 
Scottish King well. 

When King Henry was making ready to renew the war in France, 
the French King was contemplating peace. His queen, dying at 
this time, he proposed, though he was upwards of fifty years old, 
to marry King Henry's sister, the Princess Mary, who, besides 
being only sixteen, was betrothed to the Duke of Sufi'olk. As the 
inclinations of young Princesses were not much considered in such 
matters, the marriage was concluded, and the poor girl was escorted 
to France, where she was immediately left as the French King's 
bride, with only one of all her English attendants. That one was 
a pretty young girl named Anne Boleyn, niece of the Earl of 
Surrey, who had been made Duke of Norfolk, after the victory of 
Flodden Field. Anne Boleyn's is a name to be remembered, as 
you will presently find. 

And now the French King, who was very proud of his young 
wife, was preparing for many years of happiness, and she was look- 
ing forward, I dare say, to many years of misery, when he died 
within three months, and left her a young widow. The new French 
monarch, Feancis the Fiest, seeing how important it was to his 
interests that she should take for her second husband no one but 
an Englishman, advised her first lover, the Duke of Sufiblk, when 
King Henry sent him over to France to fetch her home, to marry 
her. The Princess being herself so fond of that Duke, as to tell 
him that he must either do so then, or for ever lose her, they were 
wedded ; and Henry afterwards forgave them. In making interest 
with the King, the Duke of Sufi'olk had addressed his most power- 
ful favourite and adviser, Thomas Wolsey — a name very famous 
in history for its rise and downfall. 

Wolsey was the son of a respectable butcher at Ipswich, in Suf- 
folk, and received so excellent an education that he became a tutor 
to the family of the Marquis of Dorset, who afterwards got him ap- 
pointed one of the late King's chaplains. On the accession of Henry 
the Eighth, he was promoted and taken into great favour. He was 
now Archbishop of York ; the Pope had made him a Cardinal be- 
sides ; and whoever wanted influence in England or favour with the 
King — whether he were a foreign monarch or an English nobleman 
— was obliged to make a friend of the great Cardinal Wolsey. 

He was a gay man, who could dance and jest, and sing and drink ; 
and those were the roads to so much, or rather so little, of a heart 
as King Henry had. He was wonderfully fond of pomp and glitter, 



534 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

and so Wcas the King. He knew a good deal of the Church learn- 
ing of that time ; much of which consisted in finding artful excuses 
and pretences for almost any wrong thing, and in arguing that 
black was white, or any other colour. This kind of learning pleased 
the King too. For many such reasons, the Cardinal was high in 
estimation with the King ; and, being a man of far greater ability, 
knew as well how to manage him, as a clever keeper may know how 
to manage a wolf or a tiger, or any other cruel and uncertain beast, 
that may turn upon him and tear him any day. Never had there 
been seen in England such state as my Lord Cardinal kept. His 
wealth was enormous ; equal, it was reckoned, to the riches of the 
Crown. His palaces were as splendid as the King's, and his reti- 
nue was eight hundred strong. He held his Court, dressed out 
from top to toe in flaming scarlet ; and his very shoes were golden, 
set with precious stones. His followers rode on blood horses; 
while he, with a wonderful affectation of humility in the midst of 
his great splendour, ambled on a mule with a red velvet saddle and 
bridle and gokfen stirrups. 

Through the influence of this stately priest, a grand meeting was 
arranged to take place between the French and English Kings in 
France ; but on ground belonging to England. A prodigious show 
of friendship and rejoicing was to be made on the occasion ; and 
heralds were sent to proclaim with brazen trumpets through all 
the principal cities of Europe, that, on a certain day, the Kings of 
France and England, as companions and brothers in arms, each at- 
tended by eighteen followers, would hold a tournament against all 
knights who might choose to come. 

Charles, the new Emperor of Germany (the old one being dead), 
wanted to prevent too cordial an alliance between these sovereigns, 
and came over to England before the King could repair to the 
place of meeting ; and, besides making an agreeable impression 
upon him, secured Wolsey's interest by promising that his influence 
should make him Pope when the next vacancy occurred. On the 
day when the Emperor left England, the King and all the Court 
went over to Calais, and thence to the place of meeting, between 
Ardres and G-uisnes, commonly called the Field of the Cloth of 
Gold. Here, all manner of expense and prodigality was lavished 
on the decorations of the show ; many of the knights and gentle- 
men being so superbly dressed that it was said they carried their 
whole estates upon their shoulders. 

There were sham castles, temporary chapels, fountains running 
wine, great cellars full of wine free as water to all comers, silk 
tents, gold lace and foil, gilt lions, and such things without end ; 
and, in the midst of all, the rich Cardinal out-shone and out-glit- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 535 

tered all the noblemen and- gentlemen assembled. After a treaty- 
made between the two Kings with as much solemnity as if they 
had intended to keep it, the lists — nine hundred feet long, and 
three hundred and twenty broad — were opened for the tournament ; 
the Queens of France and England looking on with great array of 
lords and ladies. Then, for ten days, the two sovereigns fought 
five combats every day, and always beat their polite adversaries; 
though they do write that the King of England, being thrown in a 
wrestle one day by the King of France, lost his kingly temper with his 
brother in arms, and wanted to make a quarrel of it. Then, there 
is a great story belonging to this Field of the Cloth of Gold, show- 
ing how the English were distrustful of the French, and the French 
of the English, until Francis rode alone one morning to Henry's 
tent ; and, going in before he was out of bed, told him in joke that 
he was his prisoner ; and how Henry jumped out of bed and em- 
braced Francis ; and how Francis helped Henry to dress, and warmed 
his linen for him ; and how Henry gave Francis a splendid jewelled 
collar, and how Francis gave Henry, in return, a costly bracelet. 
All this and a great deal more was so written about, and sung 
about, and talked about at that time (and, indeed, since that time 
too), that the world has had good cause to be sick of it, for ever. 

Of course, nothing came of all these fine doings but a speedy 
renewal of the war between England and France, in which the two 
Royal companions and brothers in arms longed very earnestly to 
damage one another. But, before it broke out again, the Duke of 
Buckingham was shamefully executed on Tower Hill, on the evi- 
dence of a discharged servant — really for nothing, except the folly of 
having believed in a friar of the name of Hopkins, who had pretended 
to be a prophet, and who had mumbled and jumbled out some non- 
sense about the Duke's son being destined to be very great in the land. 
It was believed that the unfortunate Duke had given offence to the 
great Cardinal by expressing his mind freely about the expense and 
absurdity of the whole business of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. 
At any rate, he was beheaded, as I have said, for nothing. And 
the people who saw it done were very angry, and cried out that it 
was the work of " the butcher's son ! " 

The new war was a short one, though the Earl of Surrey invaded 
France again, and did some injury to that country. It ended in 
another treaty of peace between the two kingdoms, and in the dis- 
covery that the Emperor of Germany was not such a good friend to 
England in reality, as he pretended to be. Neither did he keep his 
promise to Wolsey to make him Pope, though the King urged him. 
Two Popes died in pretty quick succession ; but the foreign priests 
were too much for the Cardinal, and kept him out of the post. So 



536 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

the Cardinal and King together found out that the Emperor of 
Germany was not a man to keep faith with ; broke off a projected 
marriage between the King's daughter Mary, Princess of Wales, 
and that sovereign ; and began to consider whether it might not be 
well to marry the young lady, either to Francis himself, or to his 
eldest son. 

There now arose at Wittemberg, in Germany, the great leader of 
the mighty change in England which is called The Reformation, 
and which set the people free from their slavery to the priests. 
This was a learned doctor, named Martin Luther, who knew all 
about them, for he had been a priest, and even a monk, himself 
The preaching and writing of Wickliffe had set a number of men 
thinking on this subject ; and Luther, finding one day to his great 
surprise, that there really was a book called the New Testament 
which the priests did not allow to be read, and which contained 
truths that they suppressed, began to be very vigorous against the 
whole body, from the Pope downward. It happened, while he 
was yet only beginning his vast work of awakening the nation, that 
an impudent fellow named Tetzel, a friar of very bad character, 
came into his neighbourhood selling what were called Indulgences, 
by wholesale, to raise money for beautifying the great Cathedral of 
Saint Peter's, at Rome. Whoever bought an Indulgence of the 
Pope was supposed to buy himself off from the punishment of 
Heaven for his offences. Luther told the people that these Indul- 
gences were worthless bits of paper, before God, and that Tetzel 
and his masters were a crew of impostors in selling them. 

The King and the Cardinal were mightily indignant at this pre- 
sumption ; and the King (with the help of Sir Thomas More, a 
wise man, whom he afterwards repaid by striking off his head) even 
wrote a book about it, with Avhich the Pope was so well pleased 
that he gave the King the title of Defender of the Faith. The 
King and the Cardinal also issued flaming warnings to the people 
not to read Luther's books, on pain of excommunication. But they 
did read them for all that ; and the rumour of what was in them^ 
spread far and wide. 

When this great change was thus going on, the King began to 
show himself in his truest and worst colours. Anne Boleyn, the 
pretty little girl who had gone abroad to France with his sister, 
was by this time grown up to be very beautiful, and was one of 
the ladies in attendance on Queen Catherine. Now, Queen Cathe- 
rine was no longer young or handsome, and it is likely that she was 
not particularly good-tetnpered ; having been always rather melan- 
choly, and having been made more so by the deaths of four of her 
children when they were very young. So, the King fell in love 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 537 

with the fair Anne Boleyn, and said to himself, " How can I be 
best rid of my own troublesome wife whom I am tired of, and 
marry Anne ? " 

You recollect that Queen Catherine had been the wife of Henry's 
brother. What does the King do, after thinking it over, but calls 
his favourite priests about him, and says, ! his mind is in such a 
dreadful state, and he is so frightfully uneasy because he is afraid 
it was not lawful for him to marry the Queen ! Not one of those 
priests had the courage to hint J;hat it was rather curious he had 
never thought of that before, and that his mind seemed to have 
been in a tolerably jolly condition during a great many years, in 
which he certainly had not fretted himself thin ; but, they all said. 
Ah ! that was very true, and it was a serious business ; and per- 
haps the best way to make it right, would be for his Majesty to be 
divorced ! The King replied, Yes, he thought that would be the 
best way, certainly ; so they all went to work. 

If I were to relate to you the intrigues and plots that took place 
in the endeavour to get this divorce, you would think the History 
of England the most tiresome book in the world. So I shall say 
no more, than that after a vast deal of negotiation and evasion, the 
Pope issued a commission to Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal 
Campeggio (whom he sent over from Italy for the purpose), to try 
the whole case in England. It is supposed — and I think with 
reason — that Wolsey was the Queen's enemy, because she had re- 
proved him for his proud and gorgeous manner of life. But he did 
not at first know that the King wanted to marry Antie Boleyn ; 
and when he did know it, he even went down on his knees, in the 
endeavour to dissuade him. 

The Cardinals opened their court in the Convent of the Black 
Friars, near to where the bridge of that name in London now 
stands ; and the King and Queen, that they might be near it, took 
up their lodgings at the adjoining palace of Bridewell, of which 
nothing now remains but a bad prison. On the opening of the 
court, when the King and Queen were called on to appear, that 
poor ill-used lady, with a dignity and firmness and yet with a 
womanly aff'ection worthy to be always admired, went and kneeled 
at the King's feet, and said that she had come, a stranger, to his 
dominions ; that she had been a good and true wife to him for 
twenty years ; and that she could acknowledge no power in those 
Cardinals to try whether she should be considered his wife after all 
that time, or should be put away. With that, she got up and left 
the court, and would never afterwards come back to it. 

The King pretended to be very much overcome, and said, ! 
my lords and gentlemen, what a good woman she was to be sure, 



538 A CHILD'S HISTOKY OE ENGLAND. 

and how delighted he would be to live with her unto death, but 
for that terrible uneasiness in his mind which was quite wearing 
him away ! So, the case went on, and there was nothing but talk 
for two months. Then Cardinal Campeggio, who, on behalf of 
the Pope, wanted nothing so much as delay, adjourned it for two 
more months ; and before that time was elapsed, the Pope himself 
adjourned it indefinitely, by requiring the King and Queen to come 
to Rome and have it tried there. But by good luck for the King, 
word was brought to him by some of liis people, that they had 
happened to meet at supper, Thomas Cranmer, a learned Doctor 
of Cambridge, who had proposed to urge the Pope on, by referring 
the case to all the learned doctors and bishops, here and there and 
everywhere, and getting their opinions that the King's marriage 
was unlawful. The King, who was now in a hurry to marry Anne 
Boleyn, thought this such a good idea, that he sent for Cranmer, 
post haste, and said to Lord Rochfort, Anne Boleyn's father, 
" Take this learned Doctor down to your country-house, and there 
let him have a good room for a study, and no end of books out of 
which to prove that I may marry your daughter." Lord Rochfort, 
not at all reluctant, made the learned Doctor as comfortable as he 
could ; and the learned Doctor went to work to prove his case. 
All this time, the King and Anne Boleyn were writing letters to 
one another almost daily, full of impatience to have the case set- 
tled ; and Anne Boleyn was showing herself (as I think) very 
worthy of the fate which afterwards befell her. 

It was bad for Cardinal Wolsey that he had left Cranmer to 
render this help. It was Avorse for him that he had tried to dis- 
suade the King from marrying Anne Boleyn. Such a servant as 
he, to such a master as Henry, would probably have fallen in any 
case ; but, between the hatred of the party of the Queen that was, 
and the hatred of the party of the Queen that was to be, he fell 
suddenly and heavily. Going down one day to the Court of Chan- 
cery, where he now presided, he was waited upon by the Dukes of 
Norfolk and Suffolk, who told him that they brought an order 
to him to resign that ofl&ce, and to withdraw quietly to a house 
he had at Esher, in Surrey. The Cardinal refusing, they rode off to 
the King; and next day came back with a letter from him, on 
reading which, the Cardinal submitted. An inventory was made 
out of all the riches in his palace at York Place (now Whitehall), 
and he went sorrowfully up the river, in his barge, to Putney. An 
abject man he was, in spite of his pride ; for being overtaken, rid- 
ing out of that place towards Esher, by one of the King's chamber- 
lains who brought him a kind message and a ring, he alighted from 
his mule, took off his cap, and kneeled down in the dirt. His poor 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 539 

Fool, whom in his prosperous days he had always kept in his palace 
to entertain him, cut a far better figure than he ; for, when the 
Cardinal said to the chamberlain that he had nothing to send to 
his lord the King as a present, but that jester who was a most ex- 
cellent one, it took six strong yeomen to remove the faithful fool 
from his master. 

The once proud Cardinal was soon further disgraced, and wrote 
the most abject letters to his vile sovereign ; who humbled him one 
day and encouraged him the next, according to his humour, until 
he was at last ordered to go and reside in his diocese of York. He 
said he was too poor ; but I don't know how he made that out, for 
he took a hundred and sixty servants with him, and seventy-two 
cart-loads of furniture, food, and wine. He remained in that part 
of the country for the best part of a year, and showed himself so 
improved by his misfortunes, and was so mild and so conciliating, 
that he won all hearts. And indeed, even in his proud days, he 
had done some magnificent things for learning and education. At 
last, he was arrested for high treason ; and, coming slowly on his 
journey towards London, got as far as Leicester. Arriving at 
Leicester Abbey after dark, and very ill, he said — when the monks 
came out at the gate with lighted torches to receive him — that he 
had come to lay his bones among them. He had indeed ; for he 
w^as taken to a bed, from which he never rose again. His last 
words were, " Had I but served God as diligently as I have served 
the King, He would not have given me over, in my grey hairs. 
Howbeit, this is my just reward for my pains and diligence, not 
regarding my service to God, but only my duty to my prince." 
The news of his death was quickly carried to the King, who was 
amusing himself with archery in the garden of the magnificent 
Palace at Hampton Court, which that very Wolsey had presented 
to him. The greatest emotion his royal mind displayed at the loss 
of a servant so faithful and so ruined, was a particular desire to lay 
hold of fifteen hundred pounds which the Cardinal was reported to 
have hidden somewhere. 

The opinions concerning the divorce, of the learned doctors and 
bishops and others, being at last collected, and being generally in 
the King's favour, were forwarded to the Pope, with an entreaty 
that he would now grant it. The unfortunate Pope, who was a 
timid man, was half distracted between his fear of his authority be- 
ing set aside in England if he did not do as he was asked, and his 
dread of off"ending the Emperor of Germany, who was Queen Cath- 
erine's nephew. In this state of mind he still evaded and did 
nothing. Then, Thomas Cromwell, who had been one of Wol- 
sey's faithful attendants, and had remained so even in his decline, 



540 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

advised the King to take the matter into his own hands, and make 
himself the head of the whole Church. This, the King by various 
artful means, began to do; but he recompensed the clergy by 
allowing them to burn as many people as they pleased, for holding 
Luther's opinions. You must understand that Sir Thomas More, 
the wise man who had helped the King with his book, had been 
made Chancellor in Wolsey's place. But, as he was truly attached 
to the Church as it was even in its abuses, he, in this state of 
things, resigned. 

Being now quite resolved to get rid of Queen Catherine, and to 
marry Anne Boleyn without more ado, the King made Cranmer 
Archbishop of Canterbury, and directed Queen Catherine to leave 
the Court. She obeyed ; but replied that wherever she went, she 
was Queen of England still, and would remain so, to the last. The 
King then married Anne Boleyn privately; and the new Archbishop 
of Canterbury, within half a year, declared his marriage with Queen 
Catherine void, and crowned Anne Boleyn Queen. 

She might have known that no good could ever come from such 
wrong, and that the corpulent brute who had been so faithless and 
so cruel to his first wife, could be more faithless and more cruel to 
his second. She might have known that, even when he was in 
love with her, he had been a mean and selfish coward, running 
away, like a frightened cur, from her society and her house, when 
a dangerous sickness broke out in it, and when she might easily 
have taken it and died, as several of the household did. But, Anne 
Boleyn arrived at all this knowledge too late, and bought it at a 
dear price. Her bad marriage with a worse man came to its natu- 
ral end. Its natural end was not, as we shall too soon see, a 
natural death for her. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

england under henry the eighth. 

Part the Second. 

The Pope was thrown into a very angry state of mind when he 
heard of the King's marriage, and fumed exceedingly. Many of 
the English monks and friars, seeing that their order was in dan- 
ger, did the same ; some even declaimed against the King in church 
before his face, and were not to be stopped until he himself roared 
out " Silence ! " The King, not much the worse for this, took it 
pretty quietly ; and was very glad when his Queen gave birth to a 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 541 

daughter, who was christened Elizabeth, and declared Princess 
of Wales as her sister Mary had already been. 

One of the most atrocious features of this reign was that Henry 
the Eighth was always trimming between the reformed religion 
and the unreformed one ; so that the more he quarrelled with the 
Pope, the more of his own subjects he roasted alive for not holding 
the Pope's opinions. Thus, an unfortunate student named John 
Frith, and a poor simple tailor named Andrew Hewet who loved 
him very much, and said that whatever John Frith believed lie 
believed, were burnt in Smithfield — to show what a capital Chris- 
tian the King was. 

But, these were speedily followed by two much greater victims, 
Sir Thomas More, and John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester. The 
latter, who was a good and amiable old man, had committed no 
greater offence than believing in Elizabeth Barton, called the Maid 
of Kent — another of those ridiculous women who pretended to be 
inspired, and to make all sorts of heavenly revelations, though 
they indeed uttered nothing but evil nonsense. For this offence — 
as it was pretended, but really for denying the King to be the 
supreme Head of the Church — he got into trouble, and was put 
in prison ; but, even then, he might have been suffered to die 
naturally (short work having been made of executing the Kentish 
Maid and her principal followers), but that the Pope, to spite the 
King, resolved to make him a cardinal. Upon that the King 
made a ferocious joke to the effect that the Pope might send Fisher 
a red hat — Vv^hich is the way they make a cardinal — but he 
should have no head on which to wear it ; and he was tried with 
all unfairness and injustice, and sentenced to death. He died like 
a noble and virtuous old man, and left a worthy name behind him. 
The King supposed, I dare say, that Sir Thomas More would be 
frightened by this example ; but, as he was not to be easily terri- 
fied, and, thoroughly believing in the Pope, had made up his mind 
that the King was not the rightful Head of the Church, he posi- 
tively refused to say that he was. For this crime he too was tried 
and sentenced, after having been in prison a whole year. When 
he was doomed to death, and came away from his trial with the 
edge of the executioner's axe turned towards him — as was always 
done in those times when a state prisoner came to that hopeless 
pass — he bore it quite serenely, and gave his blessing to his son, 
who pressed through the crowd in Westminster Hall and kneeled 
down to receive it. But, when he got to the Tower WTiarf on his 
way back to his prison, and his favourite daughter, Margaret 
Roper, a very good woman, rushed through the guards again and 
again, to kiss him and to weep upon his neck, he was overcome at 



542 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

last. He soon recovered, and never more showed any feeling but 
cheerfulness and courage. When he was going up the steps of the 
scaffold to his death, he said jokingly to the Lieutenant of the 
Tower, observing that they were weak and shook beneath his 
tread, " I pray you, master Lieutenant, see me safe up ; and, for 
my coming down, I can shift for myself" Also he said to the exe- 
cutioner, after he had laid his head upon the block, " Let me put 
my beard out of the way ; for that, at least, has never committed 
any treason." Then his head was struck off at a blow. These 
two executions were worthy of King Henry the Eighth. Sir 
Thomas More was one of the most virtuous men in his dominions, 
and the Bishop was one of his oldest and truest friends. But to 
be a friend of that fellow was almost as dangerous as to be his 
wife. 

When the news of these two murders got to Rome, the Pope 
raged against the murderer more than ever Pope raged since the 
world began, and prepared a Bull, ordering his subjects to take 
arms against him and dethrone him. The King took all possible 
precautions to keep that document out of his dominions, and set 
to work in return to suppress a great number of the English mon- 
asteries and abbeys. 

This destruction was begun by a body of commissioners, of 
whom Cromwell (whom the King had taken into great favour) was 
the head ; and was carried on through some few years to its entire 
completion. There is no doubt that many of these religious estab- 
lishments were religious in nothing but in name, and were crammed 
with lazy, indolent, and sensual monks. There is no doubt that 
they imposed upon the people in every possible way ; that they 
had images moved by wires, which they pretended were miracu- 
lously moved by Heaven ; that they had among them a whole tun 
measure full of teeth, all purporting to have come out of the head 
of one saint, who must indeed have been a very extraordinary per- 
son with that enormous allowance of grinders ; that they had bits 
of coal which they said had fried Saint Lawrence, and bits of toe- 
nails which they said belonged to other famous saints ; penknives, 
and boots, and girdles, which they said belonged to others; and 
that all these bits of rubbish were called Relics, and adored by the 
ignorant people. But, on the other hand, there is no doubt either, 
that the King's officers and men punished the good monks with 
the bad ; did great injustice ; demolished many beautiful things 
and many valuable libraries; destroyed numbers of paintings, 
stained glass windows, fine pavements, and carvings ; and that 
the whole court were ravenously greedy and rapacious for the divi- 
sion of this great spoil among them. The King seems to have 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 543 

grown almost mad in the ardour of this pursuit ; for he declared 
Thomas k Becket a traitor, though he had been dead so many years, 
and had his body dug up out of his grave. He must have been 
as miraculous as the monks pretended, if they had told the truth, 
for he was found with one head on his shoulders, and they had 
shown another as his undoubted and genuine head ever since his 
death ; it had brought them vast sums of money, too. The gold 
and jewels on his shrine filled two great chests, and eight men tot- 
tered as they carried them away. How rich the monasteries were 
you may infer from the fact that, when they were all suppressed, 
one hundred and thirty thousand pounds a year — in those days an 
immense sum — came to the Crown. 

These things were not done without causing great discontent 
among the people. The monks had been good landlords and hos- 
pitable entertainers of all travellers, and had been accustomed to 
give away a great deal of corn, and fruit, and meat, and other 
things. In those days it was difficult to change goods into money, 
in consequence of the roads being very few and very bad, and the 
carts and waggons of the worst description ; and they must either 
have given away some of the good things they possessed in enor- 
mous quantities, or have sufi'ered them to spoil and moulder. So, 
many of the people missed what it was more agreeable to get idly 
than to work for ; and the monks who were driven out of their 
homes and wandered about encouraged their discontent ; and there 
were, consequently, great risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. 
These were put down by terrific executions, from which the monks 
themselves did not escape, and the King went on grunting and 
growling in his own fat way, like a Royal pig. 

I have told all this story of the religious houses at one time, to 
make it plainer, and to get back to the King's domestic afiairs. 

The unfortunate Queen Catherine was by this time dead ; and the 
King was by this time as tired of his second Queen as he had been 
of his first. As he had fallen in love with Anne when she was in 
the service of Catherine, so he now fell in love with another lady in 
the service of Anne. See how wicked deeds are punished, and how 
bitterly and self-reproachfully the Queen must now have thought of 
her own rise to the throne ! The new fancy was a Lady Jane 
Seymour ; and the King no sooner set his mind on her, than he 
resolved to have Anne Boleyn's head. So, he brought a number of 
charges against Anne, accusing her of dreadful crimes which she had 
never committed, and implicating in them her own brother and cer- 
tain gentlemen in her service : among whom one Norris, and Mark 
Smeaton a musician, are best remembered. As the lords and coun- 
cillors were as afraid of the King and as subservient to him as the 



544 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

meanest peasant in England was, they brought in Anne Boleyn 
guilty, and the other unfortunate persons accused with her, guilty 
too. Those gentlemen died like men, with the exception of Smea- 
ton, who had been tempted by the King into telling lies, which he 
called confessions, and who had expected to be pardoned ; but who, 
I am very glad to say, was not. There was then only the Queen 
to dispose of. She had been surrounded in the Tower with women 
spies ; had been monstrously persecuted and foully slandered ; and 
had received no justice. But her spirit rose with her afflictions ; 
and, after having in vain tried to soften the King by writing an 
afiecting letter to him which still exists, " from her doleful prison 
in the Tower," she resigned herself to death. She said to those 
about her, very cheerfully, that she had heard say the executioner 
was a good one, and that she had a little neck (she laughed and 
clasped it with her hands as she said that), and would soon be out 
of her pain. And she was soon out of her pain, poor creature, on 
the Green inside the Tower, and her body was flung into an old box 
and put away in the ground under the chapel. 

There is a story that the King sat in his palace listening very 
anxiously for the sound of the cannon which was to announce this 
new murder ; and that, when he heard it come booming on the air, 
he rose up in great spirits and ordered out his dogs to go a-hunting. 
He was bad enough to do it ; but whether he did it or not, it is 
certain that he married Jane Seymour the very next day. 

I have not much pleasure in recording that she lived just long 
enough to give birth to a son who was christened Edward, and 
then to die of a fever : for, I cannot but think that any woman 
who married such a ruffian, and knew what innocent blood was on 
his hands, deserved the axe that would assuredly have fallen on the 
neck of Jane Seymour, if she had lived much longer. 

Cranmer had done what he could to save some of the Church 
property for purposes of rehgion and education; but, the great 
families had been so hungry to get hold of it, that very little could 
be rescued for such objects. Even Miles Coverdale, who did 
the people the inestimable service of translating the Bible into 
English (which the unreformed religion never permitted to be done), 
was left in poverty while the great families clutched the Church 
lands and money. The people had been told that when the Crown 
came into possession of these funds, it would not be necessary to 
tax them ; but they were taxed afresh directly afterwards. It was 
fortunate for them, indeed, that so many nobles were so greedy for 
this wealth ; since, if it had remained with the Crown, there might 
have been no end to tyranny for hundreds of years. One of the 
most active writers on the Church's side against the King was a 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 545 

member of his own family — a sort of distant cousin, Reginald 
Pole by name — who attacked him in the most violent manner 
(though he received a pension from him all the time), and fought 
for the Church with his pen, day and night. As he was beyond 
the King's reach — being in Italy — the King politely invited him 
over to discuss the subject ; but he, knowing better than to come, 
and wisely staying where he was, the King's rage fell upon his brother 
Lord Montague, the Marquis of Exeter, and some other gentlemen : 
who were tried for high treason in corresponding with him and aid- 
ing him — which they probably did — and were all executed. The 
Pope made Reginald Pole a cardinal ; but, so much against his will, 
that it is thought he even aspired in his own mind to the vacant 
throne of England, and had hopes of marrying the Princess Mary. 
His being made a high priest, however, put an end to all that. His 
mother, the venerable Countess of Salisbury — who was, unfortu- 
nately for herself, within the tyrant's reach — was the last of his 
relatives on whom his wrath fell. When she was told to lay her 
grey head upon the block, she answered the executioner, "No! 
My head never committed treason, and if you want it, you shall 
seize it," So, she ran round and round the scaffold with the exe- 
cutioner striking at her, and her grey hair bedabbled with blood ; 
and even when they held her down upon the block she moved her 
head about to the last, resolved to be no party to her own barbarous 
murder. All this the people bore, as they had borne everything else. 

Indeed they bore much more ; for the slow fires of Smithfield 
were continually burning, and people were constantly being roasted 
to death — still to show what a good Christian the King was. He 
defied the Pope and his Bull, which was now issued, and had come 
into England ; but he burned innumerable people whose only 
offence was that they differed from the Pope's religious opinions. 
There was a wretched man named Lambert, among others, who 
was tried for this before the King, and with whom six bishops 
argued one after another. When he was quite exhausted (as well he 
might be, after six bishops), he threw himself on the King's mercy ; 
but the King blustered out that he had no mercy for heretics. So, 
he too fed the fire. 

All this the people bore, and more than all this yet. The na- 
tional spirit seems to have been banished from the kingdom at this 
time. The very people who were executed for treason, the very 
wives and friends of the " bluff" King, spoke of him on the scaffold 
as a good prince, and a gentle prince — just as serfs in similar cir- 
cumstances have been known to do, under the Sultan and Bashaws 
of the East, or under the fierce old tyrants of Russia, who poured 
boiling and freezing water on them alternately, until they died. The 
2 N 



546 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Parliament were as bad as the rest, and gave the King whatever he 
wanted ; among other vile accommodations, they gave him new 
powers of murdering, at his will and pleasure, any one whom he 
might choose to call a traitor. But the worst measure they passed 
was an Act of Six Articles, commonly called at the time " the whip 
with six strings ; " which punished offences against the Pope's opin- 
ions, without mercy, and enforced the very worst parts of the monk- 
ish religion. Cranmer would have modified it, if he could ; but, 
being overborne by the Romish party, had not the power. As one 
of the articles declared that priests should not marry, and as he 
was married himself, he sent his wife and children into Germany, 
and began to tremble at his danger ; none the less because he was, 
and had long been, the King's friend. This whip of six strings 
was made under the King's own eye. It should never be forgotten 
of him how cruelly he supported the worst of the Popish doctrines 
when there was nothing to be got by opposing them. 

This amiable monarch now thought of taking another wife. He 
proposed to the French King to have some of the ladies of the 
French Court exhibited before him, that he might make his Royal 
choice ; but the French King answered that he would rather not 
have his ladies trotted out to be shown like horses at a fair. He 
proposed to the Dowager Duchess of Milan, who replied that she 
might have thought of such a match if she had had two heads ; 
but, that only owning one, she must beg to keep it safe. At last 
Cromwell represented that there was a Protestant Princess in Ger- 
many — those who held the reformed religion were called Protes- 
tants, because their leaders had Protested against the abuses and 
impositions of the unreformed Church — named Anne of Cleves, 
who was beautiful, and would answer the purpose admirably. The 
King said was she a large woman, because he must have a fat wife ? 
"0 yes," said Cromwell; "she was very large, just the thing." 
On hearing this the King sent over his famous painter, Hans Hol- 
bein, to take her portrait. Hans made her out to be so good- 
looking that the King was satisfied, and the marriage was arranged. 
But, whether anybody had paid Hans to touch up the picture ; or 
whether Hans, like one or two other painters, flattered a princess 
in the ordinary way of business, I cannot say : all I know is, that 
when Anne came over and the King went to Rochester to meet 
her, and first saw her without her seeing him, he swore she was "a 
great Flanders mare," and said he would never marry her. Being 
obliged to do it now matters had gone so far, he would not give 
her the presents he had prepared, and would never notice her. 
He never forgave Cromwell his part in the affair. His downfall 
dates from that time. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 547 

It was quickened by his enemies, in the interests of the unre- 
formed religion, putting in the King's way, at a state dinner, a 
niece of the Duke of Norfolk, Catheeine Howard, a young lady 
of fascinating manners, though small in stature and not particularly 
beautiful. Falling in love with her on the spot, the King soon 
divorced Anne of Cleves after making her the subject of much bru- 
tal talk, on pretence that she had been previously betrothed to 
some one else — which would never do for one of his dignity — and 
married Catherine. It is probable that on his wedding day, of all 
days in the year, he sent his faithful Cromwell to the scaffold, and 
had his head struck off. He further celebrated the occasion by 
burning at one time, and causing to be drawn to the fire on the 
same hurdles, some Protestant prisoners for denying the Pope's 
doctrines, and some Eoman Catholic prisoners for denying his own 
supremacy. Still the people bore it, and not a gentleman in Eng- 
land raised his hand. 

But, b^ a just retribution, it soon came out that Catherine 
Howard, before her marriage, had been really guilty of such crimes 
as the King had falsely attributed to his second wife Anne Boleyn ; 
so, again the dreadful axe made the King a widower, and this 
Queen passed away as so many in that reign had passed away 
before her. As an appropriate pursuit under the circumstances, 
Henry then applied himself to superintending the composition of a 
religious book called " A necessary doctrine for any Christian Man." 
He must have been a little confused in his mind, I think, at about 
this period ; for he was so false to himself as to be true to some 
one : that some one being Cranmer, whom the Duke of Norfolk 
and others of his enemies tried to ruin ; but to whom the King 
was steadfast, and to whom he one night gave his ring, charging 
him when he should find himself, next day, accused of treason, to 
show it to the council board. This Cranmer did to the confusion 
of his enemies. I suppose the King thought he might want him 
a little longer. 

He married yet once more. Yes, strange to say, he found in 
England another woman who would become his wife, and she was 
Catherine Parr, widow of Lord Latimer. She leaned towards the 
reformed religion ; and it is some comfort to know, that she tormented 
the King considerably by arguing a variety of doctrinal points with 
him on all possible occasions. She had very nearly done this to her 
own destruction. After one of these conversations the King in a 
very black mood actually instructed Gardiner, one of his bishops 
who favoured the Popish opinions, to draw a bill of accusation 
against her, which would have inevitably brought her to the scaffold 
where her predecessors had died, but that one of her friends picked 



548 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

up the paper of instructions which had been dropped in the palace, 
and gave her timely notice. She fell ill with terror ; but managed 
the King so well when he came to entrap her into further state- 
ments — by saying that she had only spoken on such points to di- 
vert his mind and to get some information from his extraordinary 
wisdom — that he gave her a kiss and called her his sweetheart. 
And, when the Chancellor came next day actually to take her to 
the Tower, the King sent him about his business, and honoured 
him with the epithets of a beast, a knave, and a fool. So near 
was Catherine Parr to the block, and so narrow was her escape ! 

There was war with Scotland in this reign, and a short clumsy 
war with France for favouring Scotland ; but, the events at home 
were so dreadful, and leave such an enduring stain on the country, 
that I need say no more of what happened abroad. 

A few more horrors, and this reign is over. There was a lady, 
Anne Askew, in Lincolnshire, who inclined to the Protestant 
opinions, and whose husband being a fierce Catholic, turned her 
out of his house. She came to London, and was considered as 
offending against the six articles, and was taken to the Tower, 
and put upon the rack — probably because it was hopad that she 
might, in her agony, criminate some obnoxious persons ; if falsely, 
so much the better. She was tortured without uttering a cry, 
until the Lieutenant of the Tower would sufier his men to torture 
her no more ; and then two priests who were present actually pulled 
off their robes, and turned the wheels of the rack with their own 
hands, so rending and twisting and breaking her that she was after- 
wards carried to the fire in a chair. She was burned with three 
others, a gentleman, a clergyman, and a tailor ; and so the world 
went on. 

Either the King became afraid of the power of the Duke of Nor- 
folk, and his son the Earl of Surrey, or they gave him some offence, 
but he resolved to pull them down, to follow all the rest who were 
gone. The son was tried first — of course for nothing — and de- 
fended himself bravely ; but of course he was found guilty, and of 
course he was executed. Then his father was laid hold of, and left 
for death too. 

But the King himself" was left for death by a Greater King, and 
the earth was to be rid of him at last. He was now a swollen, 
hideous spectacle, with a great hole in his leg, and so odious to 
every sense that it was dreadful to approach him. When he was 
found to be dying, Cranmer was sent for from his palace at Croy- 
don, and came with all speed, but found him speechless. Happily, 
in that hour he perished. He was in the fifty-sixth year of his 
age, and the thirty-eighth of his reign. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 549 

Henry the Eighth has been favoured by some Protestant writers, 
because the Reformation was achieved in his time. But the mighty 
merit of it lies with other men and not with him ; and it can be 
rendered none the worse by this monster's crimes, and none the 
better by any defence of them. The plain truth is, that he was a 
most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of 
blood and grease upon the History of England. 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

ENGLAND UNDER EDWARD THE SIXTH. 

Henry the Eighth had made a will, appointing a Council of 
sixteen to govern the kingdom for his son while he was under age 
(he was now only ten years old), and another Council of twelve to 
help them. The most powerful of the first Council was the Earl 
OF Hertford, the young King's uncle, who lost no time in bring- 
ing his nephew with great state up to Enfield, and thence to the 
Tower. It was considered at the time a striking proof of virtue 
in the young King that he was sorry for his father's death ; but, 
as common subjects have that virtue too, sometimes, we will say 
no more about it. 

There was a curious part of the late King's will, requiring his 
executors to fulfil whatever promises he had made. Some of the 
Court wondering what these might be, the Earl of Hertford and the 
other noblemen interested, said that they were promises to advance 
and enrich them. So, the Earl of Hertford made himself Duke of 
Somerset, and made his brother Edward Seymour a baron ; and 
there were various similar promotions, all very agreeable to the 
parties concerned, and very dutiful, no doubt, to the late King's 
memory. To be more dutiful still, they made themselves rich out 
of the Church lands, and were very comfortable. The new Duke 
of Somerset caused himself to be declared Protector of the king- 
dom, and was, indeed, the King. 

• As young Edward the Sixth had been brought up in the prin- 
ciples of the Protestant religion, everybody knew that they would 
be maintained. But Cranmer, to whom they were chiefly en- 
trusted, advanced them steadily and temperately. Many supersti- 
tious and ridiculous practices were stopped ; but practices which 
were harmless were not interfered with. 

The Duke of Somerset, the Protector, was anxious to have the 
young King engaged in marriage to the young Queen of Scotland, 
in order to prevent that princess from making an alliance with any 



650 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

foreign power ; but, as a large party in Scotland were unfavourable 
to this plan, he invaded that country. His excuse for doing so 
was, that the Border men — that is, the Scotch who lived in that 
part of the country where England and Scotland joined — troubled 
the English very much. But there were two sides to this question ; 
for the English Border men troubled the Scotch too ; and, through 
many long years, there were perpetual border quarrels ^which gave 
rise to numbers of old tales and songs. However, the Protector 
invaded Scotland ; and Arean, the Scottish Regent, with an army 
twice as large as his, advanced to meet him. They encountered 
on the banks of the river Esk, within a few miles of Edinburgh ; 
and there, after a little skirmish, the Protector made such moder- 
ate proposals, in offering to retire if the Scotch would only engage 
not to marry their princess to any foreign prince, that the Regent 
thought the English were afraid. But in this he made a horrible 
mistake ; for the English soldiers on land, and the English sailors 
on the water, so set upon the Scotch, that they broke and fled, and 
more than ten thousand of them were killed. It was a dreadful 
battle, for the fugitives were slain without mercy. The ground for 
four miles, all the way to Edinburgh, was strewn with dead men, 
and with arms, and legs, and heads. Some hid themselves in 
streams and were drowned ; some threw away their armour and 
were killed running, almost naked ; but in this battle of Pinkey 
the English lost only two or three hundred men. They were much 
better clothed than the Scotch ; at the poverty of whose appear- 
ance and country they were exceedingly astonished. 

A Parliament was called when Somerset came back, and it re- 
pealed the whip with six strings, and did one or two other good 
things ; though it unhappily retained the punishment of burning 
for those people who did not make believe to believe, in all relig- 
ious matters, what the Government had declared that they must 
and should believe. It also made a foolish law (meant to put 
down beggars), that any man who lived idly and loitered about for 
three days together, should be burned with a hot iron, made a 
slave, and wear an iron fetter. But this savage absurdity soon 
came to an end, and went the way of a great many other foolish 
laws. 

The Protector was now so proud that he sat in Parliament 
before all the nobles, on the right hand of the throne. Many other 
noblemen, who only wanted to be as proud if they could get a 
chance, became his enemies of course ; and it is supposed that he 
came back suddenly from Scotland because he had received news 
that his brother, Lord Seymour, was becoming dangerous to him. 
This lord was now High Admiral of England ; a very handsome 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 551 

man, and a great favourite with the Court ladies — even with the 
young Princess Elizabeth, who romped with him a little more than 
young princesses in these times do with any one. He had married 
Catherine Parr, the late King's widow, who was now dead ; and, 
to strengthen his power, he secretly supplied the young King with 
money. He may even have engaged with some of his brother's 
enemies in a plot to carry the boy off. On these and other accusa- 
tions, at any rate, he was confined in the Tower, impeached, and 
found guilty ; his own brother's name being — unnatural and sad 
to tell — the first signed to the warrant for his execution. He 
was executed on Tower Hill, and died denying his treason. One 
of his last proceedings in this world was to write two letters, one 
to the Princess Ehzabeth, and one to the Princess Mary, which a 
servant of his took charge of, and concealed in his shoe. These 
letters are supposed to have urged them against his brother, and 
to revenge his death. What they truly contained is not known ; 
but there is no doubt that he had, at one time, obtained great 
influence over the Princess Elizabeth. 

All this while, the Protestant religion was making progress. 
The images which the people had gradually come to worship, were 
removed from the churches ; the people were informed that they 
need not confess themselves to priests unless they chose ; a com- 
mon prayer-book was drawn up in the English language, which all 
could understand ; and many other improvements were made ; still 
moderately. For Cranmer was a very moderate man, and even 
restrained the Protestant clergy from violently abusing the unre- 
formed religion — as they very often did, and which was not a good 
example. But the people were at this time in great distress. The 
rapacious nobility who had come into possession of the Church lands, 
were very bad landlords. They enclosed great quantities of ground 
for the feeding of sheep, which was then more profitable than the 
growing of crops ; and this increased the general distress. So the 
people, who still understood little of what was going on about them, 
and still readily believed what the homeless monks told them — 
many of whom had been their good friends in their better days — 
took it into their heads that all this was owing to the reformed 
religion, and therefore rose in many parts of the country. 

The most powerful risings were in Devonshire and Norfolk. In 
Devonshire, the rebellion was so strong that ten thousand men 
united within a few days, and even laid siege to Exeter. But 
Lord Russell, coming to the assistance of the citizens who de- 
fended that town, defeated the rebels; and, not only hanged the 
Mayor of one place, but hanged the vicar of another from his own 
church steeple. What with hanging and killing by the sword, 



552 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

four thousand of the rebels are supposed to have fallen in that one 
county. In Norfolk (where the rising was more against the en- 
closure of open lands than against the reformed religion), the popu- 
lar leader was a man named Robert Ket, a tanner of Wymondham. 
The mob were, in the first instance, excited against the tanner by 
one John Flowerdew, a gentleman who owed him a grudge : but 
the tanner was more than a match for the gentleman, since he soon 
got the people on his side, and established himself near Norwich 
with quite an army. There was a large oak-tree in that place, on 
a spot called Moushold Hill, which Ket named the Tree of Reforma- 
tion ; and under its green boughs, he and his men sat, in the mid- 
summer weather, holding courts of justice, and debating affairs of 
state. They were even impartial enough to allow some rather tire- 
some public speakers to get up into this Tree of Reformation, and 
point out their errors to them, in long discourses, while they lay 
listening (not always without some grumbling and growling) in the 
shade below. At last, one sunny July day, a herald appeared below 
the tree, and proclaimed Ket and all his men traitors, unless from 
that moment they dispersed and went home : in which case they 
were to receive a pardon. But, Ket and his men made light of 
the herald and became stronger than ever, until the Earl of War- 
wick went after them with a sufficient force, and cut them all to 
pieces. A few were hanged, drawn, and quartered, as traitors, and 
their limbs were sent into various country places to be a terror to 
the people. Nine of them were hanged upon nine green branches 
of the Oak of Reformation ; and so, for the time, that tree may 
be said to have withered away. 

The Protector, though a haughty man, had compassion for the 
real distresses of the common people, and a sincere desire to help 
them. But he was too proud and too high in degree to hold even 
their favour steadily ; and many of the nobles always envied and 
hated him, because they were as proud and not as high as he. He 
was at this time building a great Palace in the Strand : to get the 
stone for which he blew up church steeples with gunpowder, and 
pulled down bishops' houses : thus making himself still more dis- 
liked. At length, his principal enemy, the Earl of Warwick — 
Dudley by name, and the son of that Dudley who had made him- 
self so odious with Empson, in the reign of Henry the Seventh — 
joined with seven other members of the Council against him, formed 
a separate Council ; and, becoming stronger in a few days, sent him 
to the Tower under twenty-nine articles of accusation. After being 
sentenced by the Council to the forfeiture of all his offices and lands, 
he was liberated and pardoned, on making a very humble submission. 
He was even taken back into the Council again, after having suffered 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 553 

this fall, and married his daughter, Lady Anne Seymour, to War- 
wick's eldest son. But such a reconciliation was little likely to last, 
and did not outlive a year. Warwick, having got himself made 
Duke of Northumberland, and having advanced the more important 
of his friends, then finished the history by causing the Duke of 
Somerset and his friend Lord Grey, and others, to be arrested for 
treason, in having conspired to seize and dethrone the King. They 
were also accused of having intended to seize the new Duke of 
Northumberland, with his friends Lord Northampton and Lord 
Pembroke ; to murder them if they found need ; and to raise the 
City to revolt. All this the fallen Protector positively denied ; ex- 
cept that he confessed to having spoken of the murder of those 
three noblemen, but having never designed it. He was acquitted 
of the charge of treason, and found guilty of the other charges ; so 
when the people — who remembered his having been their friend, 
now that he was disgraced and in danger, saw him come out from 
his trial with the axe turned from him — they thought he was alto- 
gether acquitted, and set up a loud shout of joy. 

But the Duke of Somerset was ordered to be beheaded on Tower 
Hill, at eight o'clock in the morning, and proclamations were issued 
bidding the citizens keep at home until after ten. They filled the 
streets, however, and crowded the place of execution as soon as it 
was light ; and, with sad faces and sad hearts, saw the once power- 
ful Protector ascend the scafibld to lay his head upon the dreadful 
block. While he was yet saying his last words to them with manly 
courage, and telling them, in particular, how it comforted him, at 
that pass, to have assisted in reforming the national religion, a 
member of the Council was seen riding up on horseback. They 
again thought that the Duke was saved by his bringing a reprieve, 
and again shouted for joy. But the Duke himself told them they 
were mistaken, and laid down his head and had it struck off at a 
blow. 

Many of the bystanders rushed forward and steeped their hand- 
kerchiefs in his blood, as a mark of their affection. He had, indeed, 
been capable of many good acts, and one of them was discovered 
after he was no more. The Bishop of Durham, a very good man, 
had been informed against to the Council, when the Duke was in 
power, as having answered a treacherous letter proposing a rebellion 
against the reformed religion. As the answer could not be found, 
he could not be declared guilty ; but it was now discovered, hidden 
by the Duke himself among some private papers, in his regard for 
that good man. The Bishop lost his office, and was deprived of 
his possessions. 

It is not very pleasant to know that while his uncle lay in prison 



554 A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 

under sentence of death, the young King was being vastly enter- 
tained by plays, and dances, and sham fights : but there is no 
doubt of it, for he kept a journal himself. It is pleasanter to know 
that not a single Eoman Catholic was burnt in this reign for hold- 
ing that religion ; though two wretched victims suffered for heresy. 
One, a woman named Joan Bocher, for professing some opinions 
that even she could only explain in unintelligible jargon. The 
other, a Dutchman, named Von Paris, who practised as a surgeon 
in London. Edward was, to his credit, exceedingly unwilling to 
sign the warrant for the woman's execution : shedding tears before 
he did so, and telling Cranmer, who urged him to do it (though 
Cranmer really would have spared the woman at first, but for her 
own determined obstinacy), that the guilt was not his, but that of 
the man who so strongly urged the dreadful act. We shall see, 
too soon, whether the time ever came when Cranmer is likely to 
have remembered this with sorrow and remorse. 

Cranmer and Ridley (at first Bishop of Rochester, and after- 
wards Bishop of London) were the most powerful of the clergy of 
this reign. Others were imprisoned and deprived of their property 
for still adhering to the unreformed religion ; the most important 
among whom were Caedinek Bishop of Winchester, Heath Bishop 
of Worcester, Day Bishop of Chichester, and Bonner that Bishop 
of London who was superseded by Ridley. The Princess Mary, 
who inherited her mother's gloomy temper, and hated the reformed 
religion as connected with her mother's wrongs and sorrows - — she 
knew nothing else about it, always refusing to read a single book 
in which it was truly described — held by the unreformed religion 
too, and was the only person in the kingdom for whom the old 
Mass was allowed to be performed; nor would the young King 
have made that exception even in her favour, but for the strong 
persuasions of Cranmer and Ridley. He always viewed it with 
horror ; and when he fell into a sickly condition, after having been 
very ill, first of the measles and then of the small-pox, he was 
greatly troubled in mind to think that if he died, and she, the next 
heir to the throne, succeeded, the Roman Catholic religion would 
be set up again. 

This uneasiness, the Duke of Northumberland was not slow to 
encourage : for, if the Princess Mary came to the throne, he, who 
had taken part with the Protestants, was sure to be disgraced. 
Now, the Duchess of Suffolk was descended from King Henry the 
Seventh ; and, if she resigned what little or no right she had, in 
favour of her daughter Lady Jane Grey, that would be the suc- 
cession to promote the Duke's greatness ; because Lord Guilford 
Dudley, one of his sons, was, at this very time, newly married to 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 555 

her. So, he worked upon the King's fears, and persuaded him to 
set aside both the Princess Mary and the Princess Ehzabeth and 
assert his right to appoint his successor. Accordingly the youno- 
King handed to the Crown lawyers a writing signed half a dozen 
times over by himself, appointing Lady Jane Grey to succeed to 
the Crown, and requiring them to have his will made out according 
to law. They were much against it at first, and told the Kino- so • 
but the Duke of JS-orthumberland — being so violent about it'that 
the lawyers even expected him to beat them, and hotly declarino- 
that, stripped to his shirt, he would fight any man in such a quar" 
rel — they yielded. Cranmer, also, at first hesitated; pleadino- that 
he had sworn to maintain the succession of the Crown to the°Prin- 
cess Mary; but, he was a weak man in his resolutions, and after- 
wards signed the document with the rest of the Council. 

It was completed none too soon ; for Edward was now sinkino- 
m a rapid decline; and, by way of making him better, they 
handed him over to a woman-doctor who pretended to be able to 
cure It. He speedily got worse. On the sixth of July, in the 
year one thousand five hundred and fifty-three, he died, very peace- 
ably and piously, praying Cod, with his last breath, to protect the 
reiormed rehgion. 

This King died in the sixteenth year of his age, and in the 
seventh of his reign. It is difficult to judge what the character of 
one so young might afterwards have become among so many bad 
ambitious, quarrelling nobles. But, he was an amiable boy, of very 
good abiHties, and had nothing coarse or cruel or brutal in his dis- 
position — which in the son of such a father is rather surprisino- 



CHAPTER XXX. 

ENGLAND UNDER MARY. 

The Duke of Northumberland was very anxious to keep the 
young Kings death a secret, in order that he might get the two 
Princesses into his power. But, the Princess Mary, being informed 
ot that event as she was on her way to London to see her sick 
Drotlier, turned her horse's head, and rode away into Norfolk The 
Earl of Arundel was her friend, and it was he who sent her warn- 
ing of what had happened. 

As the secret could not be kept, the Duke of Northumberland 
and the Council sent for the Lord Mayor of London and some of the 
aldermen, and made a merit of telling it to them. Then, they made 



556 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

it known to the people, and set ofif to inform Lady Jane Grey that 
she was to be Queen. 

She was a pretty girl of only sixteen, and was amiable, learned, and 
clever. When the lords who came to her fell on their knees before 
her, and told her what tidings they brought, she was so astonished 
that she fainted. On recovering, she expressed her sorrow for the 
young King's death, and said that she knew she was unfit to govern 
the kingdom ; but that if she must be Queen, she prayed God to 
direct her. She was then at Sion House, near Brentford ; and the 
lords took her down the river in state to the Tower, that she might 
remain there (as the custom was) until she was crowned. But the 
people were not at all favourable to Lady Jane, considering that 
the right to be Queen was Mary's, and greatly disliking the Duke 
of Northumberland. They were not put into a better humour by 
the duke's causing a vintner's servant, one Gabriel Pot, to be taken 
up for expressing his dissatisfaction among the crowd, and to have 
his ears nailed to the pillory, and cut off. Some powerful men 
among the nobility declared on Mary's side. They raised troops 
to support her cause, had her proclaimed Queen at Norwich, and 
gathered around her at the castle of Framlingham, which belonged 
to the Duke of Norfolk. For, she was not considered so safe as 
yet, but that it was best to keep her in a castle on the sea-coast, 
from whence she might be sent abroad, if necessary. 

The Council would have despatched Lady Jane's father, the Duke 
of Suffolk, as the general of the army against this force ; but, as 
Lady Jane implored that her father might remain with her, and as 
he was known to be but a weak man, they told the Duke of Nor- 
thumberland that he must take the command himself. He was not 
very ready to do so, as he mistrusted the Council much ; but there 
was no help for it, and he set forth with a heavy heart, observing 
to a lord who rode beside him through Shoreditch at the head of 
the troops, that, although the people pressed in great numbers to 
look at them, they were terribly silent. 

And his fears for himself turned out to be well founded. While 
he was waiting at Cambridge for further help from the Council, the 
Council took it into their heads to turn their backs on Lady Jane's 
cause, and to take up the Princess Mary's. This was chiefly owing 
to the before-mentioned Earl of Arundel, who represented to the 
Lord Mayor and aldermen, in a second interview with those saga- 
cious persons, that, as for himself, he did not perceive the Reformed 
religion to be in much danger — which Lord Pembroke backed by 
flourishing his sword as another kind of persuasion. The Lord 
Mayor and aldermen, thus enlightened, said there could be no doubt 
that the Princess Mary ought to be Queen. So, she was proclaimed 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 557 

at the Cross by Saint Paul's, and barrels of wine were given to the 
people, and they got very drunk, and danced round blazing bon- 
fires — little thinking, poor wretches, what other bonfires would 
soon be blazing in Queen Mary's name. 

After a ten days' dream of royalty, Lady Jane Grey resigned the 
Crown with great willingness, saying that she had only accepted it 
in obedience to her father and mother; and went gladly back to her 
pleasant house by the river, and her books. Mary then came on 
towards London; and at Wanstead in Essex, was joined by her 
half-sister, the Princess Elizabeth. They passed through the streets 
of London to the Tower, and there the new Queen met some emi- 
nent prisoners then confined in it, kissed them, and gave them their 
liberty. Among these was that Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, 
who had been imprisoned in the last reign for holding to the unre- 
formed religion. Him she soon made chancellor. 

The Duke of Northumberland had been taken prisoner, and, to- 
gether with his son and five others, was quickly brought before the 
Council. He, not unnaturally, asked that Council, in his defence, 
whether it was treason to obey orders that had been issued under 
the great seal ; and, if it were, whether they, who had obeyed them 
too, ought to be his judges 1 But they made light of these points ; 
and, being resolved to have him out of the way, soon sentenced him 
to death. He had risen into power upon the death of another man, 
and made but a poor show (as might be expected) when he himself 
lay low. He entreated Gardiner to let him live, if it were only in 
a mouse's hole ; and, when he ascended the scaff'old to be beheaded 
on Tower Hill, addressed the people in a miserable way, saying 
that he had been incited by others, and exhorting them to return 
to the unreformed religion, which he told them was his faith. There 
seems reason to suppose that he expected a pardon even then, in 
return for this confession ; but it matters little whether he did or 
not. His head was struck off. 

Mary was now^ crowned Queen. She was thirty-seven years of 
age, short and thin, wrinkled in the face, and very unhealthy. But 
she had a great liking for show and for bright colours, and all the 
ladies of her Court were magnificently dressed. She had a great 
liking too for old customs, without much sense in them ; and she 
was oiled in the oldest way, and blessed in the oldest way, and done 
all manner of things to in the oldest way, at her coronation. I hope 
they did her good. 

She soon began to show her desire to put down the Reformed 
religion, and put up the unreformed one : though it was dangerous 
work as yet, the people being something wiser than they used to be. 
They even cast a shower of stones — and among them a dagger — 



558 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

at one of the royal chaplains who attacked the Reformed religion in 
a public sermon. But the Queen and her priests went steadily on. 
Ridley, the powerful bishop of the last reign, was seized and sent 
to the Tower. Latimer, also celebrated among the Clergy of the 
last reign, was likewise sent to the Tower, and Cranmer speedily 
followed. Latimer was an aged man ; and, as his guards took him 
through Smithfield, he looked round it, and said, " This is a place 
that hath long groaned for me." For he knew well, what kind of 
bonfires would soon be burning. Nor was the knowledge confined 
to him. The prisons were fast filled with the chief Protestants, 
who were there left rotting in darkness, hunger, dirt, and separa- 
tion from their friends ; many, who had time left them for escape, 
fled from the kingdom ; and the dullest of the people began, now, 
to see what was coming. 

It came on fast. A Parliament was got together ; not without 
strong suspicion of unfairness ; and they annulled the divorce, for- 
merly pronounced by Cranmer between the Queen's mother and 
King Henry the Eighth, and unmade all the laws on the subject 
of religion that had been made in the last King Edward's reign. 
They began their proceedings, in violation of the law, by having 
the old mass said before them in Latin, and by turning out a 
bishop who would not kneel down. They also declared guilty of 
treason, Lady Jane Grey for aspiring to the Crown ; her husband, 
for being her husband ; and Cranmer, for not believing in the mass 
aforesaid. They then prayed the Queen graciously to choose a 
husband for herself, as soon as might be. 

Now, the question who should be the Queen's husband had given 
rise to a great deal of discussion, and to several contending parties. 
Some said Cardinal Pole was the man — but the Queen was of 
opinion that he was not the man, he being too old and too much 
of a student. Others said that the gallant young Courtenay, 
whom the Queen had made Earl of Devonshire, was the man — 
and the Queen thought so too, for a while ; but she changed her 
mind. At last it appeared that Philip, Prince of Spain, was 
certainly the man — though certainly not the people's man; for 
they detested the idea of such a marriage from the beginning to 
the end, and murmured that the Spaniard would establish in Eng- 
land, by the aid of foreign soldiers, the worst abuses of the Popish 
religion, and even the terrible Inquisition itself 

These discontents gave rise to a conspiracy for marrying young 
Courtenay to the Princess Elizabeth, and setting them up, with 
popular tumults all over the kingdom, against the Queen. This 
was discovered in time by Gardiner; but in Kent, the old bold 
county, the people rose in their old bold way. Sir Thomas Wyat, 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 559 

a man of great daring, was their leader. He raised bis standard 
at Maidstone, marclied on to Rochester, established himself in the 
old castle there, and prepared to hold out against the Duke of Nor- 
folk, who came against him with a party of the Queen's guards, and 
a body of five hundred London men. The London men, however, 
were all for Elizabeth, and not at all for Mary. They declared, 
under the castle walls, for Wyat ; the duke retreated ; and Wyat 
came on to Deptford, at the head of fifteen thousand men. 

But these, in their turn, fell away. When he came to South- 
wark, there were only two thousand left. Not dismayed by find- 
ing the London citizens in arms, and the guns at the Tower ready 
to oppose his crossing the river there, Wyat led them off to Kings- 
ton-upon-Thames, intending to cross the bridge that he knew to be 
in that place, and so to work his way round to Ludgate, one of the 
old gates of the City. He found the bridge broken down, but 
mended it, came across, and bravely fought his way up Fleet Street 
to Ludgate Hill. Finding the gate closed against him, he fought 
his way back again, sword in hand, to Temple Bar. Here, being 
overpowered, he surrendered himself, and three or four hundred of 
his men were taken, besides a hundred killed. Wyat, in a moment 
of weakness (and perhaps of torture) was afterwards made to accuse 
the Princess Elizabeth as his accomplice to some very small extent. 
But his manhood soon returned to him, and he refused to save his 
life by making any more false confessions. He was quartered and 
distributed in the usual brutal way, and from fifty to a hundred of 
his followers were hanged. The rest were led out, with halters 
round their necks, to be pardoned, and to make a parade of crying 
out, " God save Queen Mary ! " 

In the danger of this rebellion, the Queen showed herself to be 
a woman of courage and spirit. She disdained to retreat to any 
place of safety, and went down to the Guildhall, sceptre in hand, 
and made a gallant speech to the Lord Mayor and citizens. But 
on the day after Wyat's defeat, she did the most cruel act, even of 
her cruel reign, in signing the warrant for the execution of Lady 
Jane Grey. 

They tried to persuade Lady Jane to accept the unreformed 
religion ; but she steadily refused. On the morning when she was 
to die, she saw from her window the bleeding and headless body 
of her husband brought back in a cart from the scaffold on Tower 
Hill where he had laid down his life. But, as she had declined to 
see him before his execution, lest she should be overpowered and 
not make a good end, so, she even now showed a constancy and 
calmness that will never be forgotten. She came up to the scaf- 
fold with a firm step and a quiet face, and addressed the bystanders 




LADT JANE GREY SEEING FROM THE WINDOW THE BODY OF HER 
HUSBAND. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 561 

in a steady voice. They were not numerous ; for she was too young, 
too innocent and fair, to be murdered before the people on Tower 
Hill, as her husband had just been ; so, the place of her execution 
was within the Tower itself. She said that she had done an un- 
lawful act in taking what was Queen Mary's right ; but that she 
had done so with no bad intent, and that she died a humble Chris- 
tian. She begged the executioner to despatch her quickly, and she 
asked him, " Will you take my head off before I lay me down 1 " 
He answered, " No, Madam," and then she was veiy quiet while 
they bandaged her eyes. Being blinded, and unable to see the 
block on which she was to lay her young head, she was seen to feel 
about for it with her hands, and was heard to say, confused, " 
what shall I do ! Where is it 1 " Then they guided her to the 
right place, and the executioner struck off her head. You know 
too well, now, what dreadful deeds the executioner did in England, 
through many many years, and how his axe descended on the hate- 
ful block through the necks of some of the bravest, wisest, and 
best in the land. But it never struck so cruel and so vile a blow 
as this. 

The father of Lady Jane soon followed, but was little pitied. 
Queen Mary's next object was to lay hold of Elizabeth, and this 
was pursued with great eagerness. Five hundred men were sent 
to her retired house at Ashridge, by Berkhampstead, with orders 
to bring her up, alive or dead. They got there at ten at night, 
when she was sick in bed. But, their leaders followed her lady 
into her bedchamber, whence she was brought out betimes next 
morning, and put into a litter to be conveyed to London. She was 
so weak and ill, that she was five days on the road ; still, she was 
so resolved to be seen by the people that she had the curtains of 
the litter opened ; and so, very pale and sickly, passed through the 
streets. She wrote to her sister, saying she was innocent of any 
crime, and asking why she was made a prisoner ; but she got no 
answer, and was ordered to the Tower. They took her in by the 
Traitor's Gate, to which she objected, but in vain. One of the 
lords who conveyed her offered to cover her with his cloak, as it 
was raining, but she put it away from her, proudly and scornfully, 
and passed into the Tower, and sat down in a courtyard on a stone. 
They besought her to come in out of the wet ; but she answered 
that it was better sitting there, than in a worse place. At length 
she went to her apartment, where she was kept a prisoner, though 
not so close a prisoner as at Woodstock, whither she was after- 
wards removed, and where she is said to have one day envied a 
milkmaid whom she heard singing in the sunshine as she went 
through the green fields. Gardiner, than whom there were not 
2o 



562 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

many worse men among the fierce and sullen priests, cared little to 
keep secret his stern desire for her death : being used to say that 
it was of little service to shake off the leaves, and lop the branches 
of the tree of heresy, if its root, the hope of heretics, were left. 
He failed, however, in his benevolent design. Elizabeth was, at 
length, released; and Hatfield House was assigned to her as a 
residence, under the care of one Sir Thomas Pope. 

It would seem that Philip, the Prince of Spain, was a main 
cause of this change in Elizabeth's fortunes. He was not an ami- 
able man, being, on the contrary, proud, overbearing, and gloomy ; 
but he and the Spanish lords who came over with him, assuredly 
did discountenance the idea of doing any violence to the Princess. 
It may have been mere prudence, but we will hope it was manhood 
and honour. The Queen had been expecting her husband with 
great impatience, and at length he came, to her great joy, though 
he never cared much for her. They were married by Gardiner, at 
Winchester, and there was more holiday-making among the people ; 
but they had their old distrust of this Spanish marriage, in which 
even the Parliament shared. Though the members of that Parlia- 
ment were far from honest, and were strongly suspected to have 
been bought with Spanish money, they would pass no bill to enable 
the Queen to set aside the Princess Elizabeth and appoint her own 
successor. 

Although Gardiner failed in this object, as well as in the darker 
one of bringing the Princess to the scaffold, he went on at a great 
pace in the revival of the unreformed religion. A new Parliament 
was packed, in which there were no Protestants. Preparations 
were made to receive Cardinal Pole in England as the Pope's mes- 
senger, bringing his holy declaration that all the nobility who had 
acquired Church property, should keep it — which was done to en- 
list their selfish interest on the Pope's side. Then a great scene 
was enacted, which Avas the triumph of the Queen's plans. Car- 
dinal Pole arrived in great splendour and dignity, and was received 
with great pomp. The Parliament joined in a petition expressive 
of their sorrow at the change in the national religion, and praying 
him to receive the country again into the Popish Church. With 
the Queen sitting on her throne, and the King on one side of her, 
and the Cardinal on the other, and the Parhament present, Gardi- 
ner read the petition aloud. The Cardinal then made a great 
speech, and was so obliging as to say that all was forgotten and 
forgiven, and that the kingdom was solemnly made Roman Catholic 
again. 

Everything was now ready for the lighting of the terrible bon- 
fires. The Queen having declared to the Council, in writing, that 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 563 

she would wish none of her subjects to be burnt without some of 
the Council being present, and that she would particularly wish 
there to be good sermons at all burnings, the Council knew pretty 
well what was to be done next. So, after the Cardinal had blessed 
all the bishops as a preface to the burnings, the Chancellor Gardi- 
ner opened a High Court at Saint Mary Overy, on the Southwark 
side of London Bridge, for the trial of heretics. Here, two of the 
late Protestant clergymen. Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, and 
Rogers, a Prebendary of Saint Paul's, were brought to be tried. 
Hooper was tried first for being married, though a priest, and for 
not believing in the mass. He admitted both of these accusations, 
and said that the mass was a wicked imposition. Then they tried 
Rogers, who said the same. Next morning the two were brought 
up to be sentenced ; and then Rogers said that his poor wife, being 
a German woman and a stranger in the land, he hoped might be al- 
lowed to come to speak to him before he died. To this the inhuman 
Gardiner replied, that she was not his wife. " Yea, but she is, 
my lord," said Rogers, " and she hath been my wife these eighteen 
years." His request was still refused, and they were both sent to 
Newgate ; all those who stood in the streets to sell things, being 
ordered to put out their lights that the people might not see them. 
But, the people stood at their doors with candles in their hands, 
and prayed for them as they went by. Soon afterwards, Rogers 
was taken out of jail to be burnt in Smithfield ; and, in the crowd 
as he went along, he saw his poor wife and his ten children, of 
whom the youngest was a little baby. And so he was burnt to 
death. 

The next day. Hooper, who was to be burnt at Gloucester, was 
brought out to take his last journey, and was made to wear a hood 
over his face that he might not be known by the people. But, 
they did know him for all that, down in his own part of the coun- 
try ; and, when he came near Gloucester, they lined the road, mak- 
ing prayers and lamentations. His guards took him to a lodging, 
where he slept soundly all night. At nine o'clock next morning, 
he was brought forth leaning on a staff; for he had taken cold in 
prison, and was infirm. The iron stake, and the iron chain which 
was to bind him to it, were fixed up near a great elm-tree in a 
pleasant open place before the cathedral, where, on peaceful Sun- 
days, he had been accustomed to preach and to pray, when he was 
bishop of Gloucester. This tree, which had no leaves then, it being 
February, was filled with people ; and the priests of Gloucester 
College were looking complacently on from a window, and there 
was a great concourse of spectators in every spot from which a 
glimpse of the dreadful sight could be beheld. When the old man 



564 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

kneeled down on the small platform at the foot of the stake, and 
prayed aloud, the nearest people were observed to be so attentive 
to his prayers that they were ordered to stand farther back ; for it 
did not suit the Romish Church to have those Protestant words 
heard. His prayers concluded, he went up to the stake and was 
stripped to his shirt, and chained ready for the fire. One of his 
guards had such compassion on him that, to shorten his agonies, 
he tied some packets of gunpowder about him. Then they heaped 
up wood and straw and reeds, and set them all alight. But, un- 
happily, the wood was green and damp, and there was a wind 
blowing that blew what flame there was, away. Thus, through 
three-quarters of an hour, the good old man was scorched and 
roasted and smoked, as the fire rose and sank ; and all that time 
they saw him, as he burned, moving his lips in prayer, and beating 
his breast with one hand, even after the other was burnt away and 
had fallen off. 

Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were taken to Oxford to dispute 
with a commission of priests and doctors about the mass. They 
were shamefully treated ; and it is recorded that the Oxford scholars 
hissed and howled and groaned, and misconducted themselves in an 
anything but a scholarly way. The prisoners were taken back to 
jail, and afterwards tried in Saint Mary's Church. They were all 
found guilty. On the sixteenth of the month of October, Ridley 
and Latimer were brought out, to make another of the dreadful 
bonfires. 

The scene of the suffering of these two good Protestant men was 
in the City ditch, near Baliol College. On coming to the dreadful 
spot, they kissed the stakes, and then embraced each other. And 
then a learned doctor got up into a pulpit which was placed there, 
and preached a sermon from the text, " Though I give my body to 
be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." AVhen 
you think of the charity of burning men alive, you may imagine 
that this learned doctor had a rather brazen face. Ridley would 
have answered his sermon when it came to an end, but was not 
allowed. When Latimer was stripped, it appeared that he had 
dressed himself under his other clothes, in a new shroud; and, as 
he stood in it before all the people, it was noted of him, and long 
remembered, that, whereas he had been stooping and feeble but a 
few minutes before, he now stood upright and handsome, in the 
knowledge that he was dying for a just and a great cause. Rid- 
ley's brother-in-law was there with bags of gunpowder ; and when 
they were both chained up, he tied them round their bodies. Then, 
a light was thrown upon the pile to fire it. "Be of good comfort. 
Master Ridley," said Latimer, at that awful moment, " and play the 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 565 

man ! We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in 
England, as I trust shall never be put out." And then he was seen 
to make motions with his hands as if he were washing them in the 
flames, and to stroke his aged face with them, and was heard to cry, 
" Father of Heaven, receive my soul ! " He died quickly, but the 
fire, after having burned the legs of Ridley, sunk. There he lin- 
gered, chained to the iron post, and crying, " ! I cannot bum ! 
! for Christ's sake let the fire come unto me ! " And still, when 
his brother-in-law had heaped on more wood, he was heard through 
the blinding smoke, still dismally crying, "0! I cannot burn, I 
cannot burn ! " At last, the gunpowder caught fire, and ended his 
miseries. 

Five days after this fearful scene, Gardiner went to his tremen- 
dous account before God, for the cruelties he had so much assisted 
in committing. 

Cranmer remained still alive and in prison. He was brought 
out again in February, for more examining and trying, by Bonner, 
Bishop of London : another man of blood, who had succeeded to 
Gardiner's work, even in his lifetime, when Gardiner was tired of 
it. Cranmer was now degraded as a priest, and left for death ; but, 
if the Queen hated any one on earth, she hated him, and it was re- 
solved that he should be ruined and disgraced to the utmost. There 
is no doubt that the Queen and her husband personally urged on 
these deeds, because they wrote to the Council, urging them to be 
active in the kindling of the fearful fires. As Cranmer was known 
not to be a firm man, a plan was laid for surrounding him with art- 
ful people, and inducing him to recant to the unreformed religion. 
Deans and friars visited him, played at bowls with him, showed him 
various attentions, talked persuasively with him, gave him money for 
his prison comforts, and induced him to sign, I fear, as many as six 
recantations. But when, after all, he was taken out to be burnt, he 
was nobly true to his better self, and made a glorious end. 

After prayers and a sermon, Dr. Cole, the preacher of the day 
(who had been one of the artful priests about Cranmer in prison), 
required him to make a public confession of his faith before the 
people. This, Cole did, expecting that he would declare himself a 
Roman Catholic. "I ivill make a profession of my faith," said 
Cranmer, " and with a good will too." 

Then, he arose before them all, and took from the sleeve of his robe 
a written prayer and read it aloud. That done, he kneeled and said 
the Lord's Prayer, all the people joining ; and then he arose again and 
told them that he believed in the Bible, and that in what he had 
lately written, he had written what was not the truth, and that, be- 
cause his right hand had signed those papers, he would burn his right 



566 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

hand first when he came to the fire. As for the Pope, he did refuse 
him and denounce him as the enemy of Heaven. Hereupon the 
pious Dr. Cole cried out to the guards to stop that heretic's mouth 
and take him away. 

So they took him away, and chained him to the stake, where he 
hastily took off his own clothes to make ready for the flames. And 
he stood before the people with a bald head and a white and flow- 
ing beard. He was so firm now, when the worst was come, that 
he again declared against his recantation, and was so impressive and 
so undismayed, a certain lord, who was one of the directors of the 
execution, called out to the men to make haste ! When the fire 
was lighted, Cranmer, true to his latest word, stretched out his 
right hand, and crying out, " This hand hath offended ! " held it 
among the flames, until it blazed and burned away. His heart 
was found entire among his ashes, and he left at last a memorable 
name in English history. Cardinal Pole celebrated the day by 
saying his first mass, and next day he was made Archbishop of 
Canterbury in Cranmer's place. 

The Queen's husband, who was now mostly abroad in his own 
dominions, and generally made a coarse jest of her to his more 
familiar courtiers, was at war with France, and came over to seek 
the assistance of England. England was very unwilling to engage 
in a French war for his sake ; but it happened that the King of 
France, at this very time, aided a descent upon the English coast. 
Hence, war was declared, greatly to Philip's satisfaction ; and the 
Queen raised a sum of money with which to carry it on, by every 
unjustifiable means in her power. It met with no profitable return, 
for the French Duke of Guise surprised Calais, and the English sus- 
tained a complete defeat. The losses they met with in France greatly 
mortified the national pride, and the Queen never recovered the blow. 

There was a bad fever raging in England at this time, and I am 
glad to write that the Queen took it, and the hour of her death 
came. "When I am dead and my body is opened," she said to 
those around her, "ye shall find Calais written on my heart." I 
should have thought, if anything were written on it, they would 
have found the words — Jane Grey, Hooper, Rogers, Ridley, 
Latimer, Cranmer, and three hundred people burnt alive 

WITHIN FOUR years OF MY WICKED REIGN, INCLUDING SIXTY 

WOMEN AND FORTY LITTLE CHILDREN. But it is cuough that their 
deaths were written in Heaven. 

The Queen died on the seventeenth of November, fifteen hundred 
and fifty-eight, after reigning not quite five years and a half, and 
in the forty-fourth year of her age. Cardinal Pole died of the same 
fever next day. 



A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 567 

As Bloody Queen Mary, this woman has become famous, and 
as Bloody Queen Mary, she will ever be justly remembered 
with horror and detestation in Great Britain. Her memory has 
been held in such abhorrence that some writers have arisen in 
later years to take her part, and to show that she was, upon the 
whole, quite an amiable and cheerful sovereign ! "By their fruits 
ye shall know them," said Our Saviour. The stake and the fire 
were the fruits of this reign, and you will judge this Queen by 
nothing else. 



CHAPTER XXXI. 

ENGLAND UNDER ELIZABETH. 

There v/as great rejoicing all over the land when the Lords of 
the Council went down to Hatfield, to hail the Princess Elizabeth 
as the new Queen of England. Weary of the barbarities of Mary's 
reign, the people looked with hope and gladness to the Aew Sov- 
ereign. The nation seemed to wake from a horrible dream ; and 
Heaven, so long hidden by the smoke of the fires that roasted men 
and women to death, appeared to brighten once more. 

Queen Elizabeth was five-and-twenty years of age when she rode 
through the streets of London, from the Tower to Westminster 
Abbey, to be crowned. Her countenance was strongly marked, but 
on the whole, commanding and dignified ; her hair was red, and 
her nose something too long and sharp for a woman's. She was 
not the beautiful creature her courtiers made out; but she was 
well enough, and no doubt looked all the better for coming after the 
dark and gloomy Mary. She was well educated, but a roundabout 
writer, and rather a hard swearer and coarse talker. She was 
clever, but cunning and deceitful, and inherited much of her father's 
violent temper. I mention this now, because she has been so 
over-praised by one party, and so over-abused by another, that it 
is hardly possible to understand the greater part of her reign 
without first understanding what kind of woman she really 
was. 

She began her reign with the great advantage of having a very 
wise and careful minister, Sir William Cecil, whom she after- 
wards made Lord Burleigh. Altogether, the people had greater 
reason for rejoicing than they usually had, when there were pro- 
cessions in the streets ; and they were happy with some reason. 
All kinds of shows and images were set up ; Gog and Magog were 
hoisted to the top of Temple Bar ; and (which was more to the 
purpose) the Corporation dutifully presented the young Queen with 



568 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

the sum of a thousand marks in gold — so heavy a present, that 
she was obliged to take it into her carriage with both hands. The 
coronation was a great success ; and, on the next day, one of the 
courtiers presented a petition to the new Queen, praying that as 
it was the custom to release some prisoners on such occasions, she 
would have the goodness to release the four Evangelists, Matthew, 
Mark, Luke, and John, and also the Apostle Saint Paul, who had 
been for some time shut up in a strange language so that the people 
could not get at them. 

To this, the Queen replied that it would be better first to in- 
quire of themselves whether they desired to be released or not ; 
and, as a means of finding out, a great public discussion — a sort 
of religious tournament — was appointed to take place between 
certain champions of the two religions, in Westminster Abbey. 
You may suppose that it was soon made pretty clear to common 
sense, that for people to benefit by what they repeat or read, it 
is rather necessary they should understand something about it. 
Accordingly, a Church Service in plain English was settled, and 
other laws and regulations were made, completely establishing the 
great work of the Keformation. The Romish bishops and cham- 
pions were not harshly dealt with, all things considered ; and the 
Queen's ministers were both prudent and merciful. 

The one great trouble of this reign, and the unfortunate cause of 
the greater part of such turmoil and bloodshed as occurred in it, 
was Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. We will try to understand, 
in as few words as possible, who Mary was, what she was, and how 
she came to be a thorn in the royal pillow of Elizabeth. 

She was the daughter of the Queen Regent of Scotland, Mary 
OF GrUiSE. She had been married, when a mere child, to the 
Dauphin, the son and heir of the King of France. The Pope, 
who pretended that no one could rightfully wear the crown of 
England without his gracious permission, was strongly opposed to 
Elizabeth, who had not asked for the said gracious permission. 
And as Mary Queen of Scots would have inherited the English 
crown in right of her birth, supposing the English Parliament not 
to have altered the succession, the Pope himself, and most of the 
discontented who were followers of his, maintained that Mary was 
the rightful Queen of England, and Elizabeth the wrongful Queen. 
Mary being so closely connected with France, and France being 
jealous of England, there was far greater danger in this than there 
would have been if she had had no alliance with that great power. 
And when her young husband, on the death of his father, became 
Francis the Second, King of France, the matter grew very serious. 
For, the young couple styled themselves King and Queen of Eng- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 569 

land, and the Pope was disposed to help them by doing all the mis- 
chief he could. 

Now, the Keformed religion, under the guidance of a stern and 
powerful preacher, named John Knox, and other such men, had 
been making fierce progress in Scotland. It was still a half savao-e 
country, where there was a great deal of murdering and rioting con- 
tinually going on ; and the Reformers, instead of reforming those 
evils as they should have done, went to work in the ferocious old 
Scottish spirit, laying churches and chapels waste, pulling down pict- 
ures and altars, and knocking about the Grey Friars, and the Black 
Friars, and the White Friars, and the friars of all sorts of colours 
in all directions. This obdurate and harsh spirit of the Scottish 
Reformers (the Scotch have always been rather a sullen and frown- 
ing people in religious matters) put up the blood of the Romish 
French court, and caused France to send troops over to Scotland 
with the hope of setting the friars of all sorts of colours on their 
legs again; of conquering that country first, and England after- 
wards ; and so crushing the Reformation all to pieces. The Scot- 
tish Reformers, who had formed a great league which they called 
ihe Congregation of the Lord, secretly represented to Elizabeth 
that if the Reformed religion got the worst of it with them, it would 
be likely to get the worst of it in England too ; and thus, Elizabeth, 
though she had a high notion of the rights of Kings and Queens to 
do anything they liked, sent an army to Scotland to support the 
Ketormers, who were in arms against their sovereign. All these 
proceedings led to a treaty of peace at Edinburgh, under which the 
French consented to depart from the kingdom. By a separate 
treaty, Mary and her young husband engaged to renounce their 
assumed title of King and Queen of England. But this treaty 
they never fulfilled. 

It happened, soon after matters had got to this state, that the 
young French King died, leaving Mary a young widow. She was 
then invited by her Scottish subjects to return home and reign over 
them; and as she was not now happy where she was, she, after a 
little time, complied. 

Ehzabeth had been Queen three years, when Mary Queen of 
bcots embarked at Calais for her own rough quarrelling country 
As she came out of the harbour, a vessel was lost before her eyes 
and she said, " ! good God ! what an omen this is for such a voy- 
age ! She was very fond of France, and sat on the deck, looking 
back at it and weeping, until it was quite dark. When she went 
to bed, she directed to be called at daybreak, if the French coast 
were still visible, that she might behold it for the last time. As it 
proved to be a clear morning, this was done, and she again wept 



670 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

for the country she was leaving, and said many times, "Farewell, 
France ! Farewell, France ! I shall never see thee again ! " All 
this was long remembered afterwards, as sorrowful and interesting 
in a fair young princess of nineteen. Indeed, I am afraid it gradu- 
ally came, together v/ith her other distresses, to surround her with 
greater sympathy than she deserved. 

When she came to Scotland, and took up her abode at the palace 
of Holyrood in Edinburgh, she found herself among uncouth stran- 
gers and wild uncomfortable customs very different from her expe- 
riences in the court of France. The very people who were disposed 
to love her, made her head ache when she was tired out by her 
voyage, with a serenade of discordant music — a fearful concert of 
bagpipes, I suppose — and brought her and her train home to her 
palace on miserable little Scotch horses that appeared to be half 
starved. Among the people who were not disposed to love her, 
she found the powerful leaders of the Reformed Church, who were 
bitter upon her amusements, however innocent, and denounced mu- 
sic and dancing as works of the devil. John Knox himself often 
lectured her, violently and angrily, and did much to make her life 
unhappy. All these reasons confirmed her old attachment to the 
Romish religion, and caused her, there is no doubt, most impru- 
dently and dangerously both for herself and for England too, to give 
a solemn pledge to the heads of the Romish Church that if she 
ever succeeded to the English crown, she would set up that religion 
again. In reading her unhappy history, you must always remember 
this ; and also that during her whole life she was constantly put 
forward against the Queen, in some form or other, by the Romish 
party. 

That Elizabeth, on the other hand, was not inclined to like her, 
is pretty certain. Elizabeth was very vain and jealous, and had an 
extraordinary dislike to people being married. She treated Lady 
Catherine Grey, sister of the beheaded Lady Jane, with such shame- 
ful severity, for no other reason than her being secretly married, 
that she died and her husband was ruined ; so, when a second mar- 
riage for Mary began to be talked about, probably Elizabeth disliked 
her more. Not that Elizabeth wanted suitors of her own, for they 
started up from Spain, Austria, Sweden, and England. Her Eng- 
lish lover at this time, and one whom she much favoured too, was 
Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester — himself secretly mar- _ 
ried to Amy Robsart, the daughter of an English gentleman, whom ■ 
he was strongly suspected of causing to be murdered, down at his ' i 
country seat, Cumnor Hall in Berkshire, that he might be free to 
marry the Queen. Upon this story, the great writer. Sir Walter 
Scott, has founded one of his best romances. But if Elizabeth 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 571 

knew how to lead her handsome fiivourite on, for her own vanity 
and pleasure, she knew how to stop him for her own pride ; and his 
love, and all the other proposals, came to nothing. The Queen al- 
ways declared in good set speeches, that she would never be mar- 
ried at all, but would live and die a Maiden Queen. It was a very 
pleasant and meritorious declaration I suppose; but it has been 
puflfed and trumpeted so much, that I am rather tired of it myself. 

Divers princes proposed to marry Mary, but the English court 
had reasons for being jealous of them all, and even proposed as a 
matter of policy that she should marry that very Earl of Leicester 
who had aspired to be the husband of Elizabeth. At last. Lord 
Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox, and himself descended from 
the Royal Family of Scotland, went over with Elizabeth's consent 
to try his fortune at Holyrood. He was a tall simpleton; and 
could dance and play the guitar ; but I know of nothing else he 
could do, unless it were to get very drunk, and eat gluttonously, and 
make a contemptible spectacle of himself in many mean and vain 
ways. However, he gained Mary's heart, not disdaining in the 
pursuit of his object to ally himself with one of her secretaries, 
David Rizzio, who had great inlSluence with her. He soon mar- 
ried the Queen. This marriage does not say much for her, but what 
followed will presently say less. 

Mary's brother, the Earl of Murray, and head of the Protes- 
tant party in Scotland, had opposed this marriage, partly on relig- 
ious grounds, and partly perhaps from personal dislike of the very 
contemptible bridegroom. When it had taken place, through Mary's 
gaining over to it the more powerful of the lords about her, she 
banished Murray for his pains ; and, when he and some other nobles 
rose in arms to support the Reformed religion, she herself, within a 
month of her wedding day, rode against them in armour with loaded 
pistols in her saddle. Driven out of Scotland, they presented them- 
selves before Elizabeth — who called them traitors in public, and 
assisted them in private, according to her crafty nature. 

Mary had been married but a little while, when she began to hate 
her husband, who, in his turn, began to hate that David Rizzio, 
with whom he had leagued to gain her favour, and whom he now 
believed to be her lover. He hated Rizzio to that extent, that he 
made a compact with Lord Ruthven and three other lords to get 
rid of him by murder. This wicked agreement they made in solemn 
secrecy upon the first of March, fifteen hundred and sixty-six, and 
on the night of Saturday the ninth, the conspirators were brought 
by Darnley up a private staircase, dark and steep, into a range of 
rooms where they knew that Mary was sitting at supper with her 
sister, Lady Argyle, and this doomed man. When they went into 



572 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

the room, Darnlcy took the Queen round the waist, and Lord Ruth- 
ven, who had risen from a bed of sickness to do this murder, came 
in, gaunt and ghastly, leaning on two men. Rizzio ran behind the 
Queen for shelter and protection. " Let him come out of the room," 
said Ruthven. " He shall not leave the room," replied the Queen ; 
" I read his danger in your face, and it is my will that he remain 
here." They then set upon him, struggled with him, overturned 
the table, dragged him out, and killed him with fifty-six stabs. 
When the Queen heard that he was dead, she said, " No more tears. 
I will think now of revenge ! " 

Within a day or two, she gained her husband over, and prevailed 
on the tall idiot to abandon the conspirators and fly with her to 
Dunbar. There, he issued a proclamation, audaciously and falsely 
denying that he had any knowledge of the late bloody business ; 
and there they were joined by the Eael Bothwell and some other 
nobles. With their help, they raised eight thousand men, returned 
to Edinburgh, and drove the assassins into England. Mary soon 
afterwards gave birth to a son — still thinking of revenge. 

That she should have had a greater scorn for her husband after 
his late cowardice and treachery than she had had before, was natu- 
ral enough. There is little doubt that she now began to love Both- 
well instead, and to plan with him means of getting rid of Darnley. 
Bothwell had such power over her that he induced her even to par- 
don the assassins of Rizzio. The arrangements for the christening 
of the young Prince were entrusted to him, and he was one of the 
most important people at the ceremony, where the child was named 
James : Elizabeth being his godmother, though not present on the 
occasion. A week afterwards, Darnley, who had left Mary and 
gone to his father's house at Glasgow, being taken ill with the 
small-pox, she sent her own physician to attend him. But there 
is reason to apprehend that this was merely a show and a pretence, 
and that she knew what was doing, when Bothwell within another 
month proposed to one of the late conspirators against Rizzio, to 
murder Darnley, "for that it was the Queen's mind that he should 
be taken away." It is certain that on that very day she wrote to 
her ambassador in France, complaining of him, and yet went im- 
mediately to Glasgow, feigning to be very anxious about him, and 
to love him very much. If she wanted to get him in her power, she 
succeeded to her heart's content ; for she induced him to go back 
with her to Edinburgh, and to occupy, instead of the palace, a lone 
house outside the city called the Kirk of Field. Here, he lived for 
about a week. One Sunday night, she remained with him until 
ten o'clock, and then left him, to go to Holyrood to be present at 
an entertainment given in celebration of the marriage of one of her 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 573 

favourite servants. At two o'clock in the morning the city was 
shaken by a great explosion, and the Kirk of Field was blown to 
atoms. 

Darnley's body was found next day lying under a tree at some 
distance. How it came there, undisfigured and unscorched by gun- 
powder, and how this crime came to be so clumsily and strangely 
committed, it is impossible to discover. The deceitful character of 
Mary, and the deceitful character of Elizabeth, have rendered almost 
every part of their joint history uncertain and obscure. But, I fear 
that Mary was unquestionably a party to her husband's murder, 
and that this was the revenge she had threatened. The Scotch 
people universally believed it. Voices cried out in the streets of 
Edinburgh in the dead of the night, for justice on the murderess. 
Placards were posted by unknown hands in the public places de- 
nouncing Bothwell as the murderer, and the Queen as his accom- 
plice; and, when he afterwards married her (though himself already 
married), previously making a show of taking her prisoner by force, 
the indignation of the people knew no bounds. The women particu- 
larly are described as having been quite frantic against the Queen, 
and to have hooted and cried after her in the streets with terrific 
vehemence. 

Such guilty unions seldom prosper. This husband and wife had 
lived together but a month, w^hen they w^ere separated for ever by 
the successes of a band of Scotch nobles who associated against them 
for the protection of the young Prince : whom Bothwell had vainly 
endeavoured to lay hold of, and whom he would certainly have mur- 
dered, if the Earl of Mae, in whose hands the boy was, had not 
been firmly and honourably faithful to his trust. Before this angry 
power, Bothwell fled abroad, where he died, a prisoner and mad, 
nine miserable years afterwards. Mary being found by the associ- 
ated lords to deceive them at every turn, was sent a prisoner to Loch- 
leven Castle ; which, as it stood in the midst of a lake, could only 
be approached by boat. Here, one Lord Lindsay, who was so 
much of a brute that the nobles would have done better if they had 
chosen a mere gentleman for their messenger, made her sign her ab- 
dication, and appoint Murray, Regent of Scotland. Here, too, Mur- 
ray saw her in a sorrowing and humbled state. 

She had better have remained in the castle of Lochleven, dull 
prison at it was, with the rippling of the lake against it, and the 
moving shadows of the water on the room-walls ; but she could not 
rest there, and more than once tried to escape. The first time she 
had nearly succeeded, dressed in the clothes of her own washerwoman, 
but, putting up her hand to prevent one of the boatmen from lifting 
her veil, the men suspected her, seeing how white it was, and rowed 



574 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

her back again. A short time afterwards, her fascinating manners 
enlisted in her cause a boy in the castle, called the little Douglas, 
who, while the family were at supper, stole the keys of the great 
gate, went softly out with the Queen, locked the gate on the out- 
side, and rowed her away across the lake, sinking the keys as they 
went along. On the opposite shore she was met by another Doug- 
las, and some few lords ; and, so accompanied, rode away on horse- 
back to Hamilton, where they raised three thousand men. Here, 
she issued a proclamation declaring that the abdication she had signed 
in her prison was illegal, and requiring the Eegent to yield to his 
lawful Queen. Being a steady soldier, and in no way discomposed 
although he was without an army, Murray pretended to treat with 
her, until he had collected a force about half equal to her own, and 
then he gave her battle. In one quarter of an hour he cut down all 
her hopes. She had another weary ride on horseback of sixty long 
Scotch miles, and took shelter at Dundrennan Abbey, whence she 
fled for safety to Elizabeth's dominions. 

Mary Queen of Scots came to England — to her own ruin, the 
trouble of the kingdom, and the misery and death of many — in the 
year one thousand five hundred and sixty-eight. How she left it 
and the world, nineteen years afterwards, we have now to see. 

Second Part. 

When Mary Queen of Scots arrived in England, without money 
and even without any other clothes than those she wore, she wrote 
to Elizabeth, representing herself as an innocent and injured piece 
of Royalty, and entreating her assistance to oblige her Scottish sub- 
jects to take her back again and obey her. But, as her character 
was already known in England to be a very different one from what 
she made it out to be, she was told in answer that she must first 
clear herself. Made uneasy by this condition, Mary, rather than 
stay in England, would have gone to Spain, or to France, or would 
even have gone back to Scotland. But, as her doing either would 
have been likely to trouble England afresh, it was decided that she 
should be detained here. She first came to Carlisle, and, after that, 
was moved about from castle to castle, as was considered necessary ; 
but England she never left again. 

After trying very hard to get rid of the necessity of clearing her- 
self, Mary, advised by Lord Herries, her best friend in England, 
agreed to answer the charges against her, if the Scottish noblemen 
who made them would attend to maintain them before such English 
noblemen as Elizabeth might appoint for that purpose. Accord- 
ingly, such an assembly, under the name of a conference, met, first 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 575 

at York, and afterwards at Hampton Court. In its presence Lord 
Lennox, Darnley's father, openly charged Mary with the murder of 
his son ; and whatever Mary's friends may now say or write in her 
behalf, there is no doubt that, when her brother Murray produced 
against her a casket containing certain guilty letters and verses 
which he stated to have passed between her and Both well, she with- 
drew from the inquiry. Consequently, it is to be supposed that she 
was then considered guilty by those who had the best opportunities 
of judging of the truth, and that the feeling which afterwards arose 
in her behalf was a very generous but not a very reasonable one. 

However, the Duke of Norfolk, an honourable but rather weak 
nobleman, partly because Mary was captivating, partly because he 
was ambitious, partly because he was over-persuaded by artful plot- 
ters against Elizabeth, conceived a strong idea that he would like to 
marry the Queen of Scots — though he was a little frightened, too, 
by the letters in the casket. This idea being secretly encouraged 
by some of the noblemen of Elizabeth's court, and even by the 
favourite Earl of Leicester (because it was objected to by other 
favourites who were his rivals), Mary expressed her approval of it, 
and the King of France and the King of Spain are supposed to have 
done the same. It was not so quietly planned, though, but that it 
came to Elizabeth's ears, who warned the duke "to be careful what 
sort of pillow he was going to lay his head upon." He made a hum- 
ble reply at the time ; but turned sulky soon afterwards, and, being 
considered dangerous, was sent to the Tower. 

Thus, from the moment of Mary's coming to England she began 
to be the centre of plots and miseries. 

A rise of the Catholics in the north was the next of these, and 
it was only checked by many executions and much bloodshed. It 
was followed by a great conspiracy of the Pope and some of the 
Catholic sovereigns of Europe to depose EHzabeth, place Mary on 
the throne, and restore the unreformed religion. It is almost 
impossible to doubt that Mary knew and approved of this ; and 
the Pope himself w^as so hot in the matter that he issued a bull, 
in which he openly called Elizabeth the "pretended Queen" of 
England, excommunicated her, and excommunicated all her sub- 
jects who should continue to obey her. A copy of this miserable 
paper got into London, and was found one morning publicly posted 
on the Bishop of London's gate. A great hue and cry being raised, 
another copy was found in the chamber of a student of Lincoln's 
Inn, who confessed, being put upon the rack, that he had received 
it from one John Felton, a rich gentleman who lived across the 
Thames, near Southwark. This John Felton, being put upon the 
rack too, confessed that he had posted the placard on the Bishop's 



576 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

gate. For this offence he was, within four days, taken to Saint 
Paul's Churchyard, and there hanged and quartered. As to the 
Pope's bull, the people by the Eeformation having thrown oiff the 
Pope, did not care much, you may suppose, for the Pope's throw- 
ing off them. It was a mere dirty piece of paper, and not half so 
powerful as a street ballad. 

On the very day when Felton was brought to his trial, the poor 
Duke of Norfolk was released. It would have been well for him 
if he had kept away from the Tower evermore, and from the snares 
that had taken him there. But, even while he was in that dismal 
place he corresponded with Mary, and as soon as he was out of 
it, he began to plot again. Being discovered in correspondence 
with the Pope, with a view to a rising in England which should 
force Elizabeth to consent to his marriage with Mary and to repeal 
the laws against the Catholics, he was re-committed to the Tower 
and brought to trial. He was found guilty by the unanimous 
verdict of the Lords who tried him, and was sentenced to the 
block. 

It is very difficult to make out, at this distance of time, and 
between opposite accounts, whether Elizabeth really was a humane 
woman, or desired to appear so, or was fearful of shedding the 
blood of people of great name who were popular in the country. 
Twice she commanded and countermanded the execution of this 
duke, and it did not take place until five months after his trial. 
The scafibld w^as erected on Tower Hill, and there he died like 
a brave man. He refused to have his eyes bandaged, saying that 
he was not at all afraid of death ; and he admitted the justice of 
his sentence, and was much regretted by the people. 

Although Mary had shrunk at the most important time from 
disproving her guilt, she was very careful never to do anything 
that would admit it. All such proposals as were made to her by 
Elizabeth for her release, required that admission in some form 
or other, and therefore came to nothing. Moreover, both women 
being artful and treacherous, and neither ever trusting the otjier, 
it was not likely that they could ever make an agreement. So, 
the Parliament, aggravated by what the Pope had done, made new 
and strong laws against the spreading of the Catholic religion in 
England, and declared it treason in any one to say that the Queen 
and her successors were not the lawful sovereigns of England. It 
would have done more than this, but for Elizabeth's moderation. 

Since the Reformation, there had come to be three great sects 
of religious people — or people who called themselves so — in Eng- 
land ; that is to say, those who belonged to the Reformed Church, 
those who belonged to the Unreformed Church, and those who 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 577 

were" called the Puritans, because they said that they wanted to 
have everything very pure and plain in all the Church service. 
These last were for the most part an uncomfortable people, who 
thought it highly meritorious to dress in a hideous manner, talk 
through their noses, and oppose all harmless enjoyments. But 
they were powerful too, and very much in earnest, and they were 
one and all the determined enemies of the Queen of Scots. The 
Protestant feeling in England was further strengthened by the 
tremendous cruelties to which Protestants were exposed in France 
and in the Netherlands. Scores of thousands of them were put 
to death in those countries with every cruelty that can be imagined, 
and at last, in the autumn of the year one thousand five hundred 
and seventy-two, one of the greatest barbarities ever committed 
in the world took place at Paris. 

It is called in history, The Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, 
because it took place on Saint Bartholomew's Eve. The day fell 
on Saturday the twenty-third of August. On that day all the 
great leaders of the Protestants (who were there called Hugue- 
nots) were assembled together, for the purpose, as was represented 
to them, of doing honour to the marriage of their chief, the young 
King of Navarre, with the sister of Charles the Ninth : a 
miserable young King who then occupied the French throne. 
This dull creature was made to believe by his mother and other 
fierce Catholics about him that the Huguenots meant to take his 
life ; and he was persuaded to give secret orders that, on the toll- 
ing of a great bell, they should be fallen upon by an overpowering 
force of armed men, and slaughtered wherever they could be found. 
When the appointed hour was close at hand, the stupid wretch, trem- 
bling from head to foot, was taken into a balcony by his mother to 
see the atrocious work begun. The moment the bell tolled, the 
murderers broke forth. During all that night and the two next days, 
they broke into the houses, fired the houses, shot and stabbed the 
Protestants, men, women, and children, and flung their bodies into 
the streets. They were shot at in the streets as they passed along, 
and their blood ran down the gutters. Upwards of ten thousand 
Protestants were killed in Paris alone ; in all France four or five 
times that number. To return thanks to Heaven for these dia- 
bolical murders, the Pope and his train actually went in public 
procession at Rome, and as if this were not shame enough for 
them, they had a medal struck to commemorate the event. But, 
however comfortable the wholesale murders were to these high 
authorities, they had not that soothing effect upon the doll-King. 
I am happy to state that he never knew a moment's peace after- 
wards ; that he was continually crying out that he saw the Hugue- 
2p 



578 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

nots covered with blood and wounds falling dead before him ; and 
that he died within a year, shrieking and yelling and raving to 
that degree, that if all the Popes who had ever lived had been 
rolled into one, they would not have afforded His guilty Majesty 
the slightest consolation. 

When the terrible news of the massacre arrived in England, it 
made a powerful impression indeed upon the people. If they began 
to run a little wild against the Catholics at about this time, this 
fearful reason for it, coming so soon after the days of bloody Queen 
Mary, must be remembered in their excuse. The Court was not 
quite so honest as the people — but perhaps it sometimes is not. 
It received the French ambassador, with all the lords and ladies 
dressed in deep mourning, and keeping a profound silence. Never- 
theless, a proposal of marriage which he had made to Elizabeth 
only two days before the eve of Saint Bartholomew, on behalf of 
the Duke of Alen^on, the French King's brother, a boy of seven- 
teen, still went on ; while on the other hand, in her usual crafty 
way, the Queen secretly supplied the Huguenots with money and 
weapons. 

I must say that for a Queen who made all those fine speeches, 
of which I have confessed myself to be rather tired, about living 
and dying a Maiden Queen, Elizabeth was "going" to be married 
pretty often. Besides always having some English favourite or 
other whom she by turns encouraged and swore at and knocked 
about — for the Maiden Queen was very free with her fists — she 
held this French duke off and on through several years. When 
he at last came over to England, the marriage articles were actually 
drawn up, and it was settled that the wedding should take place 
in six weeks. The Queen was then so bent upon it, that she prose- 
cuted a poor Puritan named Stubbs, and a poor bookseller named 
Page, for writing and publishing a pamphlet against it. Their 
right hands were chopped off for this crime ; and poor Stubbs — 
more loyal than I should have been myself under the circumstances 
— immediately pulled off his hat with his left hand, and cried, 
" God save the Queen ! " Stubbs was cruelly treated ; for the mar- 
riage never took place after all, though the Queen pledged herself 
to the duke with a ring from her own finger. He went away, no 
better than he came, when the courtship had lasted some ten years 
altogether ; and he died a couple of years afterwards, mourned by 
Elizabeth, who appears to have been really fond of him. It is not 
much to her credit, for he was a bad enough member of a bad 
family. 

To return to the Catholics. There arose two orders of priests, 
who were very busy in England, and who were much dreaded. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 579 

These were the Jesuits (who were everywhere in all sorts of dis- 
guises), and the Seminary Priests. The people had a great 
horror of the first, because they were known to have taught that 
murder was lawful if it were done with an object of which they 
approved ; and they had a great horror of the second, because they 
came to teach the old religion, and to be the successors of " Queen 
Mary's priests," as those yet lingering in England were called, when 
they should die out. The severest laws were made against them, 
and were most unmercifully executed. Those who sheltered them 
in their houses often suffered heavily for what was an act of hu- 
manity ; and the rack, that cruel torture which tore men's limbs 
asunder, was constantly kept going. What these unhappy men 
confessed, or what was ever confessed by any one under that agony, 
must always be received with great doubt, as it is certain that 
people have frequently owned to the most absurd and impossible 
crimes to escape such dreadful suffering. But I cannot doubt it 
to have been proved by papers, that there were many plots, both 
among the Jesuits, and with France, and with Scotland, and with 
Spain, for the destruction of Queen Elizabeth, for the placing of 
Mary on the throne, and for the revival of the old religion. 

If the English people were too ready to believe in plots, there 
were, as I have said, good reasons for it. When the massacre of 
Saint Bartholomew was yet fresh in their recollection, a great 
Protestant Dutch hero, the Prince of Orange, was shot by an 
assassin, who confessed that he had been kept and trained for the 
purpose in a college of Jesuits. The Dutch, in this surprise and 
distress, offered to make Elizabeth their sovereign, but she declined 
the honour, and sent them a small army instead, under the com- 
mand of the Earl of Leicester, who, although a capital Court fa- 
vourite, was not much of a general. He did so little in Holland, 
that his campaign there would probably have been forgotten, but 
for its occasioning the death of one of the best writers, the best 
knights, and the best gentlemen, of that or any age. This was Sir 
Philip Sidney, who was wounded by a musket ball in the thigh 
as he mounted a fresh horse, after having had his own killed under 
him. He had to ride back wounded, a long distance, and was very 
faint with fatigue and loss of blood, when some water, for which he 
had eagerly asked, was handed to him. But he was so good and 
gentle even then, that seeing a poor badly wounded common soldier 
lying on the ground, looking at the water with longing eyes, he 
said, "Thy necessity is greater than mine," and gave it up to him. 
This touching action of a noble heart is perhaps as well known 
as any incident in history — is as famous far and wide as the blood- 
stained Tower of London, with its axe, and block, and murders out 



580 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

of number. So delightful is an act of true humanity, and so glad 
are mankind to remember it. 

At home, intelligence of plots began to thicken every day. I 
suppose the people never did live under such continual terrors as 
those by which they were possessed now, of Catholic risings, and 
burnings, and poisonings, and I don't know what. Still, we must 
always remember that they lived near and close to awful realities 
of that kind, and that with their experience it was not difficult to 
believe in any enormity. The government had the same fear, and 
did not take the best means of discovering the truth — for, besides 
torturing the suspected, it employed paid spies, who will always 
lie for their own profit. It even made some of the conspiracies it 
brought to light, by sending false letters to disaffected people, in- 
viting them to join in pretended plots, which they too readily did. 

But, one great real plot was at length discovered, and it ended 
the career of Mary Queen of Scots. A seminary priest named Bal- 
lard, and a Spanish soldier named Savage, set on and encouraged 
by certain French priests, imparted a design to one Antony Bab- 
INGTON — a gentleman of fortune in Derbyshire, who had been for 
some time a secret agent of Mary's — for murdering the Queen. 
Babington then confided the scheme to some other Catholic gentle- 
men who were his friends, and they joined in it heartily. They were 
vain weak-headed young men, ridiculously confident, and preposter- 
ously proud of their plan; for they got a gimcrack painting made, 
of the six choice spirits who were to murder Elizabeth, with Bab- 
ington in an attitude for the centre figure. Two of their number, 
however, one of whom was a priest, kept Elizabeth's wisest min- 
ister. Sir Francis Walsingham, acquainted with the whole 
project from the first. The conspirators were completely deceived 
to the final point, when Babington gave Savage, because he was 
shabby, a ring from his finger, and some money from his purse, 
wherewith to buy himself new clothes in which to kill the Queen. 
Walsingham, having then full evidence against the whole band, 
and two letters of Mary's besides, resolved to seize them. Sus- 
pecting something wrong, they stole out of the city, one by one, 
and hid themselves in Saint John's Wood, and other places which 
really were hiding places then ; but they were all taken, and all 
executed. When they were seized, a gentleman was sent from 
Court to inform Mary of the fact, and of her being involved in 
the discovery. Her friends have complained that she was kept in 
very hard and severe custody. It does not appear very likely, for 
she was going out a hunting that very morning. 

Queen Elizabeth had been warned long ago, by one in France 
who had good information of what was secretly doing, that in hold- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 581 

ing Mary alive, slie held " the wolf who would devour her." The 
Bishop of London had, more lately, given the Queen's favourite 
minister the advice in writing, " forthwith to cut off the Scottish 
Queen's head." The question now was, what to do with her? The 
Earl of Leicester wrote a little note home from Holland, recom- 
mending that she should be quietly poisoned ; that noble favourite 
having accustomed his mind, it is possible, to remedies of that 
nature. His black advice, however, was disregarded, and she was 
brought to trial at Fotheringay Castle in Northamptonshire, before 
a tribunal of forty, composed of both religions. There, and in the 
Star Chamber at Westminster, the trial lasted* a fortnight. She 
defended herself with great ability, but could only deny the con- 
fessions that had been made by Babington and others ; could only 
call her own letters, produced against her by her own secretaries, 
forgeries; and, in short, could only deny everything. She was 
found guilty, and declared to have incurred the penalty of death. 
The Parliament met, approved the sentence, and prayed the Queen 
to have it executed. The Queen replied that she requested them 
to consider whether no means could be found of saving Mary's life 
without endangering her own. The Parliament rejoined, No ; and 
the citizens illuminated their houses and lighted bonfires, in token 
of their joy that all these plots and troubles were to be ended by 
the death of the Queen of Scots. 

She, feeling sure that her time was now come, wrote a letter to 
the Queen of England, making three entreaties : first, that she 
might be buried in France ; secondly, that she might not be exe- 
cuted in secret, but before her servants and some others ; thirdly, 
that after her death, her servants should not be molested, but 
should be suffered to go home with the legacies she left them. 
It was an affecting letter, and Elizabeth shed tears over it, but 
sent no answer. Then came a special ambassador from France, 
and another from Scotland, to intercede for Mary's life ; and then 
the nation began to clamour, more and more, for her death. 

What the real feelings or intentions of Elizabeth were, can 
never be known now ; but I strongly suspect her of only wishing 
one thing more than Mary's death, and that was to keep free of 
the blame of it. On the first of February, one thousand five hun- 
dred and eighty-seven. Lord Burleigh having drawn out the war- 
rant for the execution, the Queen sent to the secretary Davison 
to bring it to her, that she might sign it : which she did. Next 
day, when Davison told her it was sealed, she angrily asked him 
why such haste was necessary ? Next day but one, she joked about 
it, and swore a little. Again, next day but one, she seemed to 
complain that it was not yet done, but still she would not be plain 



582 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

with those about her. So, on the seventh, the Earls of Kent and 
Shrewsbury, with the Sheriff of Northamptonshire, came with the 
warrant to Fotheringay, to tell the Queen of Scots to prepare for 
death. 

When those messengers of ill omen were gone, Mary made a 
frugal supper, drank to her servants, read over her will, went to bed, 
slept for some hours, and then arose and passed the remainder of 
the night saying prayers. In the morning she dressed herself in 
her best clothes ; and, at eight o'clock when the sheriff came for 
her to her chapel, took leave of her servants who were there assem- 
bled praying with her, and went down-stairs, carrying a Bible in 
one hand and a crucifix in the other. Two of her women and four 
of her men were allowed to be present in the hall ; where a low 
scaffold, only two feet from the ground, was erected and covered 
with black ; and where the executioner from the Tower, and his 
assistant, stood, dressed in black velvet. The hall was full of 
people. While the sentence v/as being read she sat upon a stool ; 
and, when it was finished, she again denied her guilt, as she had 
done before. The Earl of Kent and the Dean of Peterborough, in 
their Protestant zeal, made some very unnecessary speeches to her ; 
to which she replied that she died in the Catholic religion, and 
they need not trouble themselves about that matter. When her 
head and neck were uncovered by the executioners, she said that 
she had not been used to be undressed by such hands, or before so 
much company. Finally, one of her women fastened a cloth over 
her face, and she laid her neck upon the block, and repeated more 
than once in Latin, ''Into thy hands, Lord, I commend my 
spirit! " Some say her head was struck off in two blows, some 
say in three. However that be, when it was held up, stream- 
ing v/ith blood, the real hair beneath the false hair she had long 
worn was seen to be as grey as that of a woman of seventy, though 
she was at that time only in her forty-sixth year. All her beauty 
was gone. 

But she was beautiful enough to her little dog, who cowered 
under her dress, frightened, when she went upon the scaffold, and 
who lay down beside her headless body when all her earthly sorrows 
were over. 

Third Part. 

On its being formally made known to Elizabeth that the sentence 
had been executed on the Queen of Scots, she showed the utmost 
grief and rage, drove her favourites from her with violent indigna- 
tion, and sent Davison to the Tower ; from which place he was only 
released in the end by paying an immense fine which completely 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 583 

ruined him. Elizabeth not only over-acted her part in making 
these pretences, but most basely reduced to poverty one of her faith- 
ful servants for no other fault than obeying her commands. 

James, King of Scotland, Mary's son, made a show likewise of 
being very angry on the occasion ; but he was a pensioner of Eng- 
land to the amount of five thousand pounds a year, and he had 
known very little of his mother, and he possibly regarded her as 
the murderer of his father, and he soon took it quietly. 

Philip, King of Spain, however, threatened to do greater things 
than ever had been done yet, to set up the Catholic religion and 
punish Protestant England. Elizabeth, hearing that he and the 
Prince of Parma were making great preparations for this purpose, 
in order to be beforehand with them sent out Admiral Drake 
(a famous navigator, who had sailed about the world, and had al- 
ready brought great plunder from Spain) to the port of Cadiz, 
where he burnt a hundred vessels full of stores. This great loss 
obliged the Spaniards to put off the invasion for a year; but it 
was none the less formidable for that, amounting to one hundred 
and thirty ships, nineteen thousand soldiers, eight thousand sailors, 
two thousand slaves, and between two and three thousand great 
guns. England was not idle in making ready to resist this great 
force. All the men between sixteen years old and sixty, were 
trained and drilled ; the national fleet of ships (in number only 
thirty-four at first) was enlarged by public contributions and by 
private ships, fitted out by noblemen ; the city of London, of its 
own accord, furnished double the number of ships and men that 
it was required to provide ; and, if ever the national spirit was up 
in England, it was up all through the country to resist the Span- 
iards. Some of the Queen's advisers were for seizing the principal 
English Catholics, and putting them to death ; but the Queen — 
who, to her honour, used to say, that she would never believe any 
ill of her subjects, which a parent would not believe of her own 
children — rejected the advice, and only confined a few of those who 
were the most suspected, in the fens in Lincolnshire. The great 
body of Catholics deserved this confidence ; for they behaved most 
loyally, nobly, and bravely. 

So, with all England firing up like one strong angry man, and 
with both sides of the Thames fortified, and with the soldiers 
under arms, and with the sailors in their ships, the country waited 
for the coming of the proud Spanish fleet, which was called The 
Invincible Armada. The Queen herself, riding in armour on 
a white horse, and the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Leicester 
holding her bridle rein, made a brave speech to the troops at Til- 
bury Fort opposite Gravesend, which was received with such enthu- 



584 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

siasm as is seldom known. Then came the Spanish Armada into the 
English Channel, sailing along in the form of a half moon, of such 
great size that it was seven miles broad. But the English were 
quickly upon it, and woe then to all the Spanish ships that dropped 
a little out of the half moon, for the English took them instantly ! 
And it soon appeared that the great Armada was anything but 
invincible, for on a summer night, bold Drake sent eight blazing 
fire-ships right into the midst of it. In terrible consternation the 
Spaniards tried to get out to sea, and so became dispersed; the 
English pursued them at a great advantage; a storm came on, 
and drove the Spaniards among rocks and shoals ; and the swift 
end of the invincible fleet was, that it lost thirty great ships and 
ten thousand men, and, defeated and disgraced, sailed home again. 
Being afraid to go by the English Channel, it sailed all round Scot- 
land and Ireland ; some of the ships getting cast away on the latter 
coast in bad weather, the Irish, who were a kind of savages, plun- 
dered those vessels and killed their crews. So ended this great 
attempt to invade and conquer England. And I think it will be 
a long time before any other invincible fleet coming to England 
with the same object, will fare much better than the Spanish 
Armada. 

Though the Spanish King had had this bitter taste of English 
bravery, he was so little the wiser for it, as still to entertain his 
old designs, and even to conceive the absurd idea of placing his 
daughter on the English throne. But the Earl of Essex, Sir 
Walter Ealeigh, Sir Thomas Howard, and some other dis- 
tinguished leaders, put to sea from Plymouth, entered the port of 
Cadiz once more, obtained a complete victory over the shipping 
assembled there, and got possession of the town. In obedience to 
the Queen's express instructions, they behaved with great human- 
ity ; and the principal loss of the Spaniards was a vast sum of 
money which they had to pay for ransom. This was one of many 
gallant achievements on the sea, effected in this reign. Sir Walter 
Ealeigh himself, after marrying a maid of honour and giving offence 
to the Maiden Queen thereby, had already sailed to South America 
in search of gold. 

The Earl of Leicester was now dead, and so was Sir Thomas 
Walsingham, whom Lord Burleigh was soon to follow. The prin- 
cipal favourite was the Earl of Essex, a spirited and handsome 
man, a favourite with the people too as well as with the Queen, 
and possessed of many admirable qualities. It was much debated 
at Court whether there should be peace with Spain or no, and he 
was very urgent for war. He also tried hard to have his own way 
in the appointment of a deputy to govern in Ireland. One day, 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 585 

while this question was in dispute, he hastily took offence, and 
turned his back upon the Queen ; as a gentle reminder of which 
impropriety, the Queen gave him a tremendous box on the ear, and 
told him to go to the devil. He went home instead, and did not 
reappear at Court for half a year or so, when he and the Queen 
were reconciled, though never (as some suppose) thoroughly. 

From this time the fate of the Earl of Essex and that of the 
Queen seemed to be blended together. The Irish were still per- 
petually quarrelling and fighting among themselves, and he went 
over to Ireland as Lord Lieutenant, to the great joy of his enemies 
(Sir Walter Kaleigh among the rest), who were glad to have so 
dangerous a rival far ofi". Not being by any means successful there, 
and knowing that his enemies would take advantage of that circum- 
stance to injure him with the Queen, he came home again, though 
against her orders. The Queen being taken by surprise when he 
appeared before her, gave him her hand to kiss, and he was over- 
joyed — though it was not a very lovely hand by this time — but 
in the course of the same day she ordered him to confine himself to 
his room, and two or three days afterwards had him taken into 
custody. With the same sort of caprice — and as capricious an old 
woman she now was, as ever wore a crown or a head either — she 
sent him broth from her own table on his falling ill from anxiety, 
and cried about him. 

He was a man who could find comfort and occupation in his 
books, and he did so for a time ; not the least happy time, I dare 
say, of his life. But it happened unfortunately for him, that he 
held a monopoly in sweet wines : which means that nobody could 
sell them without purchasing his permission. This right, which 
was only for a term, expiring, he applied to have it renewed. The 
Queen refused, with the rather strong observation — but she did make 
strong observations — that an unruly beast must be stinted in his 
food. Upon this, the angry earl, who had been already deprived of 
many offices, thought himself in danger of complete ruin, and 
turned against the Queen, whom he called a vain old woman who 
had grown as crooked in her mind as she had in her figure. These 
uncomplimentary expressions the ladies of the Court immediately 
snapped up and carried to the Queen, whom they did not put in 
a better temper, you may believe. The same Court ladies, when 
they had beautiful dark hair of their own, used to wear false red 
hair, to be like the Queen. So they were not very high-spirited 
ladies, however high in rank. 

The worst object of the Earl of Essex, and some friends of his 
who used to meet at Lord Southampton's house, was to obtain 
possession of the Queen, and oblige her by force to dismiss her 



586 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ministers and change her favourites. On Saturday the seventh of 
February, one thousand six hundred and one, the Council suspecting 
this, summoned the earl to come before them. He, pretending to 
be ill, declined ; it was then settled among his friends, that as the 
next day would be Sunday, when many of the citizens usually as- 
sembled at the Cross by Saint Paul's Cathedral, he should make 
one bold effort to induce them to rise and follow him to the Palace. 

So, on the Sunday morning, he and a small body of adherents 
started out of his house — Essex House by the Strand, with steps 
to the river — having first shut up in it, as prisoners, some mem- 
bers of the Council who came to examine him — and hurried into 
the City with the earl at their head, crying out " For the Queen ! 
For the Queen ! A plot is laid for my life ! " No one heeded 
them, however, and when they came to Saint Paul's there were 
no citizens there. In the meantime the prisoners at Essex House 
had been released by one of the earl's own friends ; he had been 
promptly proclaimed a traitor in the City itself; and the streets 
w^ere barricaded with carts and guarded by soldiers. The earl got 
back to his house by water, with difficulty, and after an attempt to 
defend his house against the troops and cannon by which it was soon 
surrounded, gave himself up that night. He was brought to trial 
on the nineteenth, and found guilty ; on the twenty-fifth, he was 
executed on Tower Hill, where he died, at thirty-four years old, 
both courageously and penitently. His step-father suffered with 
him. His enemy. Sir Walter Ealeigh, stood near the scaffold all 
the time — but not so near it as we shall see him stand, before we 
finish his history. 

In this case, as in the cases of the Duke of Norfolk and Mary 
Queen of Scots, the Queen had commanded, and countermanded, and 
again commanded, the execution. It is probable that the death of 
her young and gallant favourite in the prime of his good qualities, 
was never off her mind afterwards, but she held out, the same vain 
obstinate and capricious woman, for another year. Then she danced 
before her Court on a state occasion — and cut, I should think, a 
mighty ridiculous figure, doing so in an immense ruff, stomacher 
and wig, at seventy years old. For another year still, she held out, 
but, without any more dancing, and as a moody sorrowful broken 
creature. At last, on the tenth of March, one thousand six hun- 
dred and three, having been ill of a very bad cold, and made worse 
by the death of the Countess of Nottingham who was her intimate 
friend, she fell into a stupor and was supposed to be dead. She 
recovered her consciousness, however, and then nothing would in- 
duce her to go to bed ; for she said that she knew that if she did, 
she should never get up again. There she lay for ten days, on 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 587 

cushions on the floor, without any food, until the Lord Admiral got 
her into bed at last, partly by persuasions and partly by main force. 
When they asked her who should succeed her, she replied that her 
seat had been the seat of Kings, and that she would have for her 
successor, "No rascal's son, but a King's." Upon this, the lords 
present stared at one another, and took the liberty of asking whom 
she meant; to which she replied, "Whom should I mean, but our 
cousin of Scotland ! " This was on the twenty- third of March. 
They asked her once again that day, after she was speechless, 
whether she was still in the same mind ? She struggled up in bed, 
and joined her hands over her head in the form of a crown, as the 
only reply she could make. At three o'clock next morning, she 
very quietly died, in the forty-fifth year of her reign. 

That reign had been a glorious one, and is made for ever 
memorable by the distinguished men who flourished in it. Apart 
from the great voyagers, statesmen, and scholars, whom it pro- 
duced, the names of Bacon, Spenser, and Shakespeaee, will 
always be remembered with pride and veneration by the civilised 
world, and will always impart (though with no great reason, per- 
haps) some portion of their lustre to the name of Elizabeth herself. 
It was a great reign for discovery, for commerce, and for English 
enterprise and spirit in general. It was a great reign for the Prot- 
estant religion and for the Reformation which made England free. 
The Queen was very popular, and in her progresses, or journeys 
about her dominions, was everywhere received with the liveliest 
joy. I think the truth is, that she was not half so good as she 
has been made out, and not half so bad as she has been made out. 
She had her fine qualities, but she was coarse, capricious, and 
treacherous, and had all the faults of an excessively vain young 
woman long after she was an old one. On the whole, she had a 
great deal too much of her father in her, to please me. 

Many improvements and luxuries were introduced in the course 
of these five-and-forty years in the general manner of living ; but 
cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and bear-baiting, were still the national 
amusements ; and a coach w^as so rarely seen, and was such an ugly 
and cumbersome affair when it was seen, that even the Queen her- 
self, on many high occasions, rode on horseback on a pillion behind 
the Lord Chancellor. 



588 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

CHAPTER XXXII. 

ENGLAND UNDEE JAMES THE FIRST. 

"Our cousin of Scotland" was ugly, awkward, and shuffling 
both in mind and person. His tongue was much too large for his 
mouth, his legs were much too weak for his body, and his dull 
goggle-eyes stared and rolled like an idiot's. He was cunning, 
covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great 
swearer, and the most conceited man on earth. His figure — what 
is commonly called rickety from his birth — presented a most 
ridiculous appearance, dressed in thick padded clothes, as a safe- 
guard against being stabbed (of which he lived in continual fear), 
of a grass-green colour from head to foot, with a hunting-horn 
dangling at his side instead of a sword, and his hat and feather 
sticking over one eye, or hanging on the back of his head, as he 
happened to toss it on. He used to loll on the necks of his fa- 
vourite courtiers, and slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their 
cheeks ; and the greatest favourite he ever had, used to sign him- 
self in his letters to his royal master. His Majesty's " dog and 
slave," and used to address his majesty as " his Sowship." His 
majesty was the worst rider ever seen, and thought himself the 
best. He was one of the most impertinent talkers (in the broadest 
Scotch) ever heard, and boasted of being unanswerable in all man- 
ner of argument. He wrote some of the most wearisome treatises 
ever read — among others, a book upon witchcraft, in which he 
was a devout believer — and thought himself a prodigy of author- 
ship. He thought, and wrote, and said, that a king had a right 
to make and unmake what laws he pleased, and ought to be ac- 
countable to nobody on earth. This is the plain true character of 
the personage whom the greatest men about the Court praised and 
flattered to that degree, that I doubt if there be anything much 
more shameful in the annals of human nature. 

He came to the English throne with great ease. The miseries 
of a disputed succession had been felt so long, and so dreadfully, 
that he was proclaimed within a few hours of Elizabeth's death, 
and was accepted by the nation, even without being asked to 
give any pledge that he would govern well, or that he would 
redress crying grievances. He took a month to come from Edin- 
burgh to London ; and, by way of exercising his new power, hanged 
a pickpocket on the journey without any trial, and knighted every- 
body he could lay hold of. He made two hundred knights before 
he got to his palace in London, and seven hundred before he had 
been in it three months. He also shovelled sixty-two new peers 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 589 

into the House of Lords — and there was a pretty large sprinkling 
of Scotchmen among them, you may believe. 

His Sowship's prime minister, Cecil (for I cannot do better than 
call his majesty what his favourite called him), was the enemy of 
Sir Walter Ealeigh, and also of Sir Walter's political friend. Lord 
CoBHAM ; and his Sowship's first trouble was a plot originated by 
these two, and entered into by some others, with the old object of 
seizing the King and keeping him in imprisonment until he should 
change his ministers. There were Catholic priests in the plot, and 
there were Puritan noblemen too ; for, although the Catholics and 
Puritans were strongly opposed to each other, they united at this 
time against his Sowship, because they knew that he had a design 
against both, after pretending to be friendly to each ; this design 
being to have only one high and convenient form of the Protestant 
religion, which everybody should be bound to belong to, whether 
they liked it or not. This plot was mixed up with another, which 
may or may not have had some reference to placing on the throne, 
at some time, the Lady Arabella Stuart ; whose misfortune it 
was, to be the daughter of the younger brother of his Sowship's 
father, but who was quite innocent of any part in the scheme. Sir 
Walter Raleigh was accused on the confession of Lord Cobham — ■ 
a miserable creature, who said one thing at one time, and another 
thing at another time, and could be relied upon in nothing. The 
trial of Sir Walter Raleigh lasted from eight in the morning until 
nearly midnight ; he defended himself with such eloquence, genius, 
and spirit against all accusations, and against the insults of Coke, the 
Attorney-General — who according to the custom of the time, foully 
abused him — that those who went there detesting the prisoner, came 
away admiring him, and declaring that anything so wonderful and so 
captivating was never heard. He was found guilty, nevertheless, and 
sentenced to death. Execution was deferred, and he was taken to the 
Tower. The two Catholic priests, less fortunate, were executed with 
the usual atrocity ; and Lord Cobham and two others were pardoned 
on the scaffold. His Sowship thought it wonderfully knowing in 
him to surprise the people by pardoning these three at the very 
block; but, blundering, and bungling, as usual, he had very nearly 
overreached himself. For, the messenger on horseback who brought 
the pardon, came so late, that he was pushed to the outside of the 
crowd, and was obliged to shout and roar out what he came for. 
The miserable Cobham did not gain much by being spared that 
day. He lived, both as a prisoner and a beggar, utterly despised, 
and miserably poor, for thirteen years, and then died in an old out- 
house belonging to one of his former servants. 

This plot got rid of, and Sir Walter Raleigh safely shut up in 



590 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

the Tower, his Sowship held a great dispute with the Puritans on 
their presenting a petition to him, and had it all his own way — 
not so very wonderful, as he would talk continually, and would not 
hear anybody else — and filled the bishops with admiration. It 
was comfortably settled that there was to be only one form of re- 
ligion, and that all men were to think exactly alike. But, although 
this was arranged two centuries and a half ago, and although the 
arrangement was supported by much fining and imprisonment, I do 
not find that it is quite successful, even yet. 

His Sowship, having that uncommonly high opinion of himself 
as a king, had a very low opinion of Parliament as a power that au- 
daciously wanted to control him. When he called his first Parlia- 
ment after he had been king a year, he accordingly thought he would 
take pretty high ground with them, and told them that he com- 
manded them " as an absolute king." The Parliament thought 
those strong words, and saw the necessity of upholding their author- 
ity. His Sowship had three children : Prince Henry, Prince Charles, 
and the Princess Elizabeth. It would have been well for one of 
these, and we shall too soon see which, if he had learnt a little 
wisdom concerning Parliaments from his father's obstinacy. 

Now, the people still labouring under their old dread of the 
Catholic religion, this Parliament revived and strengthened the 
severe laws against it. And this so angered Egbert Catesby, a 
restless Catholic gentleman of an old family, that he formed one of 
the most desperate and terrible designs ever conceived in the mind 
of man ; no less a scheme than the Gunpowder Plot. 

His object was, when the King, lords, and comxmons should be 
assembled at the next opening of Parliament, to blow them up, one 
and all, with a great mine of gunpowder. The first person to whom 
he confided this horrible idea was Thomas Winter, a Worcester- 
shire gentleman who had served in the army abroad, and had been 
secretly employed in Catholic projects. While Winter was yet 
undecided, and when he had gone over to the Netherlands, to learn 
from the Spanish ambassador there whether there was any hope 
of Catholics being relieved through the intercession of the King of 
Spain with his Sowship, he found at Ostend a tall dark daring man, 
whom he had known when they were both soldiers abroad, and 
whose name was Guido — or Guy — Fawkes. Resolved to join 
the plot, he proposed it to this man, knowing him to be the man 
for any desperate deed, and they two came back to England together. 
Here, they admitted two other conspirators : Thomas Percy, re- 
lated to the Earl of Northumberland, and John Wright, his 
brother-in-law. All these met together in a solitary house in the 
open fields which were then near Clement's Inn, now a closely 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 591 

blocked-up part of London ; and when they had all taken a great 
oath of secrecy, Catesby told the rest what his plan was. They 
then went up-stairs into a garret, and received the Sacrament from 
Father Gerard, a Jesuit, who is said not to have known actually 
of the Gunpowder Plot, but who, I think, must have had his sus- 
picions that there was something desperate afoot. 

Percy was a Gentleman Pensioner, and as he had occasional duties 
to perform about the Court, then kept at Whitehall, there would 
be nothing suspicious in his living at "Westminster. So, having 
looked well about him, and having found a house to let, the back 
of which joined the Parliament House, he hired it of a person 
named Ferris, for the purpose of undermining the wall. Having 
got possession of this house, the conspirators hired another on the 
Lambeth side of the Thames, which they used as a storehouse for 
wood, gunpowder, and other combustible matters. These were to 
be removed at night (and afterwards were removed), bit by bit, to 
the house at Westminster ; and, that there might be some trusty 
person to keep watch over the Lambeth stores, they admitted an- 
other conspirator, by name Egbert Kay, a very poor Catholic 
gentleman. 

All these arrangements had been made some months, and it was 
a dark wintry December night, when the conspirators, who had 
been in the meantime dispersed to avoid observation, met in the 
house at Westminster, and began to dig. They had laid in a good 
stock of eatables, to avoid going in and out, and they dug and dug 
with great ardour. But, the wall being tremendously thick, and 
the work very severe, they took into their plot Christopher 
Wright, a younger brother of John Wright, that they might have 
a new pair of hands to help. And Christopher Wright fell to like 
a fresh man, and they dug and dug by night and by day, and Fawkes 
stood sentinel all the time. And if any man's heart seemed to fail 
him at all, Fawkes said, " Gentlemen, we have abundance of powder 
and shot here, and there is no fear of our being taken alive, even if 
discovered." The same Fawkes, who, in the capacity of sentinel, 
was always prowling about, soon picked up the intelligence that 
the King had prorogued the Parliament again, from the seventh 
of February, the day first fixed upon, until the third of October. 
When the conspirators knew this, they agreed to separate until 
after the Christmas holidays, and to take no notice of each other 
in the meanwhile, and never to write letters to one another on any 
account. So, the house in Westminster was shut up again, and I 
suppose the neighbours thought that those strange looking men 
who lived there so gloomily, and went out so seldom, were gone 
away to have a merry Christmas somewhere. 



592 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

It was the beginning of February, sixteen hundred and five, when 
Catesby met his fellow-conspirators again at this Westminster house. 
He had now admitted three more ; John Grant, a Warwickshire 
gentleman of a melancholy temper, who lived in a doleful house 
near Stratford-upon-Avon, with a frowning wall all round it, and 
a deep moat; Robert Winter, eldest brother of Thomas; and 
Catesby's own servant, Thomas Bates, who, Catesby thought, 
had had some suspicion of what his master was about. These 
three had all suffered more or less for their religion in Elizabeth's 
time. And now, they all began to dig again, and they dug and 
dug by night and by day. 

They found it dismal work alone there, underground, with such 
a fearful secret on their minds, and so many murders before them. 
They were filled with wild fancies. Sometimes, they thought they 
heard a great bell tolling, deep down in the earth under the Parlia- 
ment House ; sometimes, they thought they heard low voices mut- 
tering about the Gunpowder Plot ; once in the morning, they really 
did hear a great rumbling noise over their heads, as they dug and 
sweated in their mine. Every man stopped and looked aghast 
at his neighbour, wondering what had happened, when that bold 
prowler, Fawkes, who had been out to look, came in and told them 
that it was only a dealer in coals who had occupied a cellar under the 
Parliament House, removing his stock in trade to some other place. 
Upon this, the conspirators, who with all their digging and digging 
had not yet dug through the tremendously thick wall, changed their 
plan; hired that cellar, which was directly under the House of Lords ; 
put six-and-thirty barrels of gunpowder in it, and covered them over 
with fagots and coals. Then they all dispersed again till September, 
when the following new conspirators were admitted ; Sir Edward 
Baynham, of Gloucestershire ; Sir Everard Digby, of Rutland- 
shire ; Ambrose Rookwood, of Suffolk ; Francis Tresham, of 
Northamptonshire. Most of these were rich, and were to assist 
the plot, some with money and some with horses on which the con- 
spirators were to ride through the country and rouse the Catholics 
after the Parliament should be blown into air. 

Parliament being again prorogued from the third of October to 
the fifth of November, and the conspirators being uneasy lest their 
design should have been found out, Thomas Winter said he would 
go up into the House of Lords on the day of the prorogation, and 
see how matters looked. Nothing could be better. The uncon- 
scious commissioners were walking about and talking to one another, 
just over the six-and-thirty barrels of gunpowder. He came back 
and told the rest so, and they went on with their preparations. 
They hired a ship, and kept it ready in the Thames, in which 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 593 

Fawkes was to sail for Flanders after firing with a slow match the 
train that was to explode the powder. A number of Catholic gentle- 
men not in the secret, were invited, on pretence of a hunting party, 
to meet Sir Everard Digby at Dunchurch on the fatal day, that 
they miglit be ready to act together. And now all was ready. 

But, now, the great wickedness and danger which had been all 
along at the bottom of this wicked plot, began to show itself As 
the fifth of November drew near, most of the conspirators, re- 
membering that they had friends and relations who would be in 
the House of Lords that day, felt some natural relenting, and a 
wish to warn them to keep away. They were not much comforted 
by Catesby's declaring that in such a cause he would blow up his 
own son. Lord Mounteagle, Tresham's brother-in-law, was cer- 
tain to be in the house ; and when Tresham found that he could 
not prevail upon the rest to devise any means of sparing their 
friends, he wrote a mysterious letter to this lord and left it at his 
lodging in the dusk, urging him to keep away from the opening of 
Parhament, "since God and man had concurred to punish the 
wickedness of the times." It contained the words "that the Par- 
liament should receive a terrible blow, and yet should not see who 
hurt them." And it added, "the danger is past, as soon as you 
have burnt the letter." 

The ministers and courtiers made out that his Sowship, by a 
direct miracle from Heaven, found out what this letter meant. 
The truth is, that they were not long (as few men would be) in 
finding out for themselves ; and it was decided to let the conspira- 
tors alone, until the very day before the opening of Parliament. 
That the conspirators had their fears, is certain ; for, Tresham him- 
self said before them all, that they were every one dead men ; and, 
although even he did not take flight, there is reason to suppose 
that he had warned other persons besides Lord Mounteagle. How- 
ever, they were all firm ; and Fawkes, who was a man of iron, went 
down every day and night to keep watch in the cellar as usual. 
He was there about two in the afternoon of the fourth, when the 
Lord Chamberlain and Lord Mounteagle threw open the door and 
looked in. "Who are you, friend?" said they. "Why," said 
Fawkes, " I am Mr. Percy's servant, and am looking after his store 
of fuel here." " Your master has laid in a pretty good store," they 
returned, and shut the door, and went away. Fawkes, upon this, 
posted off" to the other conspirators to tell them all was quiet, and 
went back and shut himself up in the dark black cellar again, 
where he heard the bell go twelve o'clock and usher in the fifth of 
November. About two hours afterwards, he slowly opened the 
door, and came out to look about him, in his old prowling way. 
2q 



594 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

He was instantly seized and bound, by a party of soldiers under 
Sir Thomas Knevett. He had a watch upon him, some touch- 
wood, some tinder, some slow matches ; and there was a dark lan- 
tern with a candle in it, lighted, behind the door. He had his 
boots and spurs on — to ride to the ship, I suppose — and it was 
well for the soldiers that they took him so suddenly. If they had 
left him but a moment's time to light a match, he certainly would 
have tossed it in among the powder, and blown up himself and 
them. 

They took him to the King's bed-chamber first of all, and there 
the King (causing him to be held very tight, and keeping a good 
way off), asked him how he could have the heart to intend to de- 
stroy so many innocent people? "Because," said Guy Fawkes, 
" desperate diseases need desperate remedies." To a little Scotch 
favourite, with a face like a terrier, who asked him (with no par- 
ticular wisdom) why he had collected so much gunpowder, he re- 
plied, because he had meant to blow Scotchmen back to Scotland, 
and it would take a deal of powder to do that. Next day he was 
carried to the Tower, but would make no confession. Even after 
being horribly tortured, he confessed nothing that the Government 
did not already know ; though he must have been in a fearful state 
— as his signature, still preserved, in contrast with his natural hand- 
writing before he was put upon the dreadful rack, most fright- 
fully shows. Bates, a very different man, soon said the Jesuits 
had had to do with the plot, and probably, under the torture, 
would as readily have said anything. Tresham, taken and put in 
the Tower too, made confessions and unmade them, and died of an 
illness that was heavy upon him. Book wood, who had stationed 
relays of his own horses all the way to Dunchurch, did not mount 
to escape until the middle of the day, when the news of the plot 
was all over London. On the road, he came up with the two 
Wrights, Catesby, and Percy ; and they all galloped together into 
Northamptonshire. Thence to Dunchurch, where they found the 
proposed party assembled. Finding, however, that there had been 
a plot, and that it had been discovered, the party disappeared in 
the course of the night, and left them alone with Sir Everard 
Digby. Away they all rode again, through Warwickshire and 
Worcestershire, to a house called Holbeach, on the borders of Staf- 
fordshire. They tried to raise the Catholics on their way, but were 
indignantly driven off by them. All this time they were hotly pur- 
sued by the sheriff of Worcester, and a fast increasing concourse of 
riders. At last, resolving to defend themselves at Holbeach, they 
shut themselves up in the house, and put some wet powder before 
the fire to dry. But it blew up, and Catesby was singed and 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 595 

blackened, and almost killed, and some of the others were sadly- 
hurt. Still, knowing that they must die, they resolved to die 
there, and with only their swords in their hands appeared at the 
windows to be shot at by the sheriff and his assistants. Catesby 
said to Thomas Winter, after Thomas had been hit in the right arm 
which dropped powerless by his side, "Stand by me, Tom, and 
we will die together ! " — which they did, being shot through the 
body by two bullets from one gun. John Wright, and Christopher 
Wright, and Percy, were also shot. Rockwood and Digby were 
taken : the former with a broken arm and a wound in his body 
too. 

It was the fifteenth of January, before the trial of Guy Fawkes, 
and such of the other conspirators as were left alive, came on. 
They were all found guilty, all hanged, drawn, and quartered : 
some, in Saint Paul's Churchyard, on the top of Ludgate-hill ; 
some, before the Parliament House. A Jesuit priest, named Henry 
Garnet, to whom the dreadful design was said to have been com- 
municated, was taken and tried ; and two of his servants, as well 
as a poor priest who was taken with him, were tortured without 
mercy. He himself was not tortured, but was surrounded in the 
Tower by tamperers and traitors, and so was made unfairly to con- 
vict himself out of his own mouth. He said, upon his trial, that 
he had done all he could to prevent the deed, and that he could 
not make public what had been told him in confession — though I 
am afraid he knew of the plot in other ways. He was found 
guilty and executed, ' after a manful defence, and the Catholic 
Church made a saint of him ; some rich and powerful persons, who 
had had nothing to do with the project, were fined and imprisoned 
for it by the Star Chamber ; the Catholics, in general, who had 
recoiled with horror from the idea of the infernal contrivance, were 
unjustly put under more severe laws than before ; and this was the 
end of the Gunpowder Plot. 

Second Part. 

His Sowship would pretty willingly, I think, have blown the 
House of Commons into the air himself ; for, his dread and jealousy 
of it knew no bounds all through his reign. When he was hard 
pressed for money he was obliged to order it to meet, as he could 
get no money without it ; and when it asked him first to abolish 
some of the monopolies in necessaries of life which were a great 
grievance to the people, and to redress other public wrongs, he 
flew into a rage and got rid of it again. At one time he wanted 
it to consent to the Union of England with Scotland, and quar- 



696 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

relied about that. At another time it wanted him to put down a 
most infamous Church abuse, called the High Commission Court, 
and he quarrelled with it about that. At another time it entreated 
him not to be quite so fond of his archbishops and bishops who 
made speeches in his praise too awful to be related, but to have 
some little consideration for the poor Puritan clergy who were per- 
secuted for preaching in their own way, and not according to the 
archbishops and bishops ; and they quarrelled about that. In 
short, what with hating the House of Commons, and pretending 
not to hate it ; and what with now sending some of its members 
who opposed him, to Newgate or to the Tower, and now telling the 
rest that they must not presume to make speeches about the public 
affairs which could not possibly concern them; and what with 
cajoling, and bullying, and frightening, and being frightened ; the 
House of Commons was the plague of his Sowship's existence. It 
was pretty firm, however, in maintaining its rights, and insisting 
that the Parliament should make the laws, and not the King by 
his own single proclamations (which he tried hard to do) ; and his 
Sowship was so often distressed for money, in consequence, that 
he sold every sort of title and public office as if they were merchan- 
dise, and even invented a new dignity called a Baronetcy, which 
anybody could buy for a thousand pounds. 

These disputes with his Parliaments, and his hunting, and his 
drinking, and his lying in bed — for he was a great sluggard — 
occupied his Sowship pretty well. The rest of his time he chiefly 
passed in hugging and slobbering his favourites. The first of these 
was Sir Philip Herbert, who had no knowledge whatever, except 
of dogs, and horses, and hunting, but whom he soon made Earl of 
Montgomery. The next, and a much more famous one, was Rob- 
ert Carr, or Ker (for it is not certain which was his right name), 
who came from the Border country, and whom he soon made Vis- 
count Rochester, and afterwards, Earl of Somerset. The way 
in which his Sowship doted on this handsome young man, is even 
more odious to think of, than the way in which the really great men 
of England condescended to bow down before him. The favourite's 
great friend was a certain Sir Thomas Overbury, who wrote his 
love-letters for him, and assisted him in the duties of his many high 
places, which his own ignorance prevented him from discharging. 
But this same Sir Thomas having just manhood enough to dissuade 
the favourite from a wicked marriage with the beautiful Countess 
of Essex, who was to get a divorce from her husband for the pur- 
pose, the said Countess, in her rage, got Sir Thomas put into the 
Tower, and there poisoned him. Then the favourite and this bad 
woman were publicly married by the King's pet bishop, with as 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 507 

much to-do and rejoicing, as if he had been the best man, and she 
the best woman, upon the face of the earth. 

But, after a longer sunshine than might have been expected — of 
seven years or so, that is to say — another handsome young man 
started up and eclipsed the Eael of Somerset. This was George 
ViLLiERS, the youngest son of a Leicestershire gentleman : who 
came to Court with all the Paris fashions on him, and could dance 
as well as the best mountebank that ever was seen. He soon 
danced himself into the good graces of his Sowship, and danced the 
other favourite out of favour. Then, it was all at once discovered 
that the Earl and Countess of Somerset had not deserved all 
those great promotions and mighty rejoicings, and they were sepa- 
rately tried for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and for other 
crimes. But, the King was so afraid of his late favourite's publicly 
telling some disgraceful things he knew of him — which he darkly 
threatened to do — that he was even examined with two men stand- 
ing, one on either side of him, each with a cloak in his hand, ready 
to throw it over his head and stop his mouth if he should break out 
with what he had it in his power to tell. So, a very lame affair was 
purposely made of the trial, and his punishment was an allowance 
of four thousand pounds a year in retirement, while the Countess 
was pardoned, and allowed to pass into retirement too. They hated 
one another by this time, and lived to revile and torment each other 
some years. 

While these events were in progress, and while his Sowship was 
making such an exhibition of himself, from day to day and from 
year to year, as is not often seen in any sty, three remarkable deaths 
took place in England. The first was that of the minister, Eobert 
Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who was past sixty, and had never been 
strong, being deformed from his birth. He said at last that he 
had no wish to live; and no minister need have had, with his 
experience of the meanness and wickedness of those disgraceful 
times. The second was that of the Lady Arabella Stuart, who 
alarmed his Sowship mightily, by privately marrying William Sey- 
mour, son of Lord Beauchamp, who was a descendant of King 
Henry the Seventh, and who, his Sowship thought, might conse- 
quently increase and strengthen any claim she might one day set up 
to the throne. She was separated from her husband (who was put 
in the Tower) and thrust into a boat to be confined at Durham. 
She escaped in a man's dress to get away in a French ship from 
Gravesend to France, but unhappily missed her husband, who had 
escaped too, and was soon taken. She went raving mad in the 
miserable Tower, and died there after four years. The last, and the 
most important of these three deaths, was that of Prince Henry, 



598 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

the heir to the throne, in the nineteenth year of his age. He was 
a promising young prince, and greatly liked ; a quiet well-conducted 
youth, of whom two very good things are known : first, that his 
father was jealous of him ; secondly, that he was the friend of Sir 
Walter Raleigh, languishing through all those years in the Tower, 
and often said that no man but his father would keep such a bird 
in such a cage. On the occasion of the preparations for the mar- 
riage of his sister the Princess Elizabeth with a foreign prince (and 
an unhappy marriage it turned out), he came from Richmond, where 
he had been very ill, to greet his new brother-in-law, at the palace 
at Whitehall. There he played a great game at tennis, in his shirt, 
though it was very cold weather, and was seized with an alarming 
illness, and died within a fortnight of a putrid fever. For this 
young prince Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, in his prison in the Tower, 
the beginning of a History of the World : a wonderful instance how 
little his Sowship could do to confine a great man's mind, however 
long he might imprison his body. 

And this mention of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had many faults, 
but who never showed so many merits as in trouble and adversity, 
may bring me at once to the end of his sad story. After an im- 
prisonment in the Tower of twelve long years, he proposed to re- 
sume those old sea voyages of his, and to go to South America in 
search of gold. His Sowship, divided between his wish to be on 
good terms with the Spaniards through whose territory Sir Walter 
must pass (he had long had an idea of marrying Prince Henry to 
a Spanish Princess), and his avaricious eagerness to get hold of the 
gold, did not know what to do. But, in the end, he set Sir Wal- 
ter free, taking securities for his return ; and Sir Walter fitted out 
an expedition at his own cost, and, on the twenty-eighth of March, 
one thousand six hundred and seventeen, sailed away in command 
of one of its ships, which he ominously called the Destiny. The 
expedition failed; the common men, not finding the gold they had 
expected, mutinied ; a quarrel broke out between Sir Walter and 
the Spaniards, who hated him for old successes of his against them ; 
and he took and burnt a little town called Saint Thomas. For 
this he was denounced to his Sowship by the Spanish ambassador 
as a pirate ; and returning almost broken-hearted, with his hopes 
and fortunes shattered, his company of friends dispersed, and his 
brave son (who had been one of them) killed, he was taken — 
through the treachery of Sir Lewis Stukely, his near relation, a 
scoundrel and a Vice- Admiral — and was once again immured in his 
prison-home of so many years. 

His Sowship being mightily disappointed in not getting any gold, 
Sir Walter Raleigh was tried as unfairly, and with as many lies and 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND 599 

evasions as the judges and law officers and every other authority in 
Church and State habitually practised under such a King. After 
a great deal of prevarication on all parts but his own, it was de- 
clared that he must die under his former sentence, now fifteen years 
old. So, on the twenty-eighth of October, one thousand six hun- 
dred and eighteen, he was shut up in the Gate House at Westmin- 
ster to pass his last night on earth, and there he took leave of his 
good and faithful lady who was worthy to have lived in better days. 
At eight o'clock next morning, after a cheerful breakfast, and a pipe, 
and a cup of good wine, he was taken to Old Palace Yard in West- 
minster, where the scaffold was set up, and where so many people 
of high degree were assembled to see him die, that it was a matter 
of some difficulty to get him through the crowd. He behaved most 
nobly, but if anything lay heavy on his mind, it was that Earl of 
Essex, whose head he had seen roll off; and he solemnly said that 
he had had no hand in bringing him to the block, and that he had 
shed tears for him when he died. As the morning was very cold, 
the Sheriff said, would he come down to a fire for a little space, and 
warm himself? But Sir Walter thanked him, and said no, he 
would rather it were done at once, for he was ill of fever and ague, 
and in another quarter of an hour his shaking fit would come upon 
him if he were still alive, and his enemies might then suppose that 
he trembled for fear. With that, he kneeled and made a very beau- 
tiful and Christian prayer. Before he laid his head upon the block 
he felt the edge of the axe, and said, with a smile upon his face, 
that it was a sharp medicine, but would cure the worst disease. 
When he was bent down ready for death, he said to the executioner, 
finding that he hesitated, " What dost thou fear ? Strike, man ! " 
So, the axe came down and struck his head off, in the sixty-sixth 
year of his age. 

The new favourite got on fast. He was made a viscount, he was 
made Duke of Buckingham, he was made a marquis, he was made 
Master of the Horse, he was made Lord High Admiral — and the 
Chief Commander of the gallant English forces that had dispersed 
the Spanish Armada, was displaced to make room for him. He 
had the whole kingdom at his disposal, and his mother sold all the 
profits and honours of the State, as if she had kept a shop. He 
blazed all over with diamonds and other precious stones, from his 
hatband and his earrings to his shoes. Yet he was an ignorant 
presumptuous swaggering compound of knave and fool, with nothing 
but his beauty and his dancing to recommend him. This is the 
gentleman who called himself his Majesty's dog and slave, and called 
his Majesty Your Sowship. His Sowship called him Steenie ; it 
is supposed, because that was a nickname for Stephen, and because 



600 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Saint Stephen was generally represented in pictures as a handsome 
saint. 

His Sowship was driven sometimes to his wits'-end by his trim- 
ming between the general dislike of the Catholic religion at home, 
and his desire to wheedle and flatter it abroad, as his only means of 
getting a rich princess for his son's wife : a part of whose fortune 
he might cram into his greasy pockets. Prince Charles — or as his 
Sowship called him, Baby Charles — being now Prince of Wales, 
the old project of a marriage with the Spanish King's daughter had 
been revived for him ; and as she could not marry a Protestant 
without leave from the Pope, his Sowship himself secretly and 
meanly wrote to his Infallibility, asking for it. The negotiation for 
this Spanish marriage takes up a larger space in great books, than 
you can imagine, but the upshot of it all is, that when it had been 
held off by the Spanish Court for a long time. Baby Charles and 
Steenie set off in disguise as Mr. Thomas Smith and Mr. John 
Smith, to see the Spanish Princess ; that Baby Charles pretended 
to be desperately in love with her, and jumped off walls to look at 
her, and made a considerable fool of himself in a good many ways ; 
that she was called Princess of Wales, and that the whole Spanish 
Court believed Baby Charles to be all but dying for her sake, as he 
expressly told them he was ; that Baby Charles and Steenie came 
back to England, and were received with as much rapture as if they 
had been a blessing to it ; that Baby Charles had actually fallen in 
love with Henrietta Maria, the French King's sister, whom he 
had seen in Paris; that he thought it a wonderfully fine and princely 
thing to have deceived the Spaniards, all through; and that he 
openly said, with a chuckle, as soon as he was safe and sound at 
home again, that the Spaniards were great fools to have believed 
him. 

Like most dishonest men, the Prince and the favourite complained 
that the people whom they had deluded were dishonest. They 
made such misrepresentations of the treachery of the Spaniards in 
this business of the Spanish match, that the English nation became 
eager for a war with them. Although the gravest Spaniards laughed 
at the idea of his Sowship in a warlike attitude, the Parliament 
granted money for the beginning of hostilities, and the treaties with 
Spain were publicly declared to be at an end. The Spanish am- 
bassador in London — probably with the help of the fallen favour- 
ite, the Earl of Somerset — being unable to obtain speech with his 
Sowship, slipped a paper into his hand, declaring that he was a 
prisoner in his own house, and was entirely governed by Bucking- 
ham and his creatures. The first eft'ect of this letter was that his 
Sowship began to cry and whine, and took Baby Charles away from 



A CHILD'S HISTOEY OF ENGLAND. 601 

Steenie, and went down to Windsor, gabbling all sorts of nonsense. 
The end of it was that his Sowship hugged his dog and slave, and 
said he was quite satisfied. 

He had given the Prince and the favourite almost unlimited 
power to settle anything with the Pope as to the Spanish marriage ; 
and he now, with a view to the French one, signed a treaty that all 
Roman Catholics in England should exercise their religion freely, 
and should never be required to take any oath contrary thereto. In 
return for this, and for other concessions much less to be defended, 
Henrietta Maria was to become the Prince's wife, and was to bring 
him a fortune of eight hundred thousand crowns. 

His Sowship's eyes were getting red with eagerly looking for the 
money, when the end of a gluttonous life came upon him ; and, 
after a fortnight's illness, on Sunday the twenty-seventh of March, 
one thousand six hundred and twenty-five, he died. He had reigned 
twenty-two years, and was fifty-nine years old. I know of nothing 
more abominable in history than the adulation that was lavished on 
this King, and the vice and corruption that such a barefaced habit 
of lying produced in his Court. It is much to be doubted whether 
one man of honour, and not utterly self-disgraced, kept his place 
near James the First. Lord Bacon, that able and wise philosopher, 
as the First Judge in the Kingdom in this reign, became a public 
spectacle of dishonesty and corruption ; and in his base flattery of 
his Sowship, and in his crawling servility to his dog and slave, dis- 
graced himself even more. But, a creature like his Sowship set 
upon a throne is like the Plague, and everybody receives infection 
from him. 



CHAPTER XXXIII. 

ENGLAND UNDER CHARLES THE FIRST. 

Baby Charles became King Charles the First, in the 
twenty-fifth year of his age. Unlike his father, he was usually 
amiable in his private character, and grave and dignified in his bear- 
ing ; but, like his father, he had monstrously exaggerated notions of 
the rights of a king, and was evasive, and not to be trusted. If his 
word could have been relied upon, his history might have had a 
different end. 

His first care was to send over that insolent upstart, Bucking- 
ham, to bring Henrietta Maria from Paris to be his Queen ; upon 
which occasion Buckingham — with his usual audacity — made love 
to the young Queen of Austria, and was very indignant indeed with 
Cardinal Richelieu, the French Minister, for thwarting his in- 



602 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

tentions. The English people were very well disposed to like their 
new Queen, and to receive her with great favour when she came 
among them as a stranger. But, she held the Protestant religion 
in great dislike, and brought over a crowd of unpleasant priests, 
who made her do some very ridiculous things, and forced them- 
selves upon the public notice in many disagreeable ways. Hence, 
the people soon came to dislike her, and she soon came to dislike 
them ; and she did so much all through this reign in setting the 
King (who was dotingly fond of her) against his subjects, that it 
would have been better for him if she had never been born. . 

Now, you are to understand that King Charles the First — of 
his own determination to be a high and mighty King not to be 
called to account by anybody, and urged on by his Queen besides 
— deliberately set himself to put his Parliament down and to put 
himself up. You are also to understand, that even in pursuit of 
this wrong idea (enough in itself to have ruined any king) he never 
took a straight course, but always took a crooked one. 

He was bent upon war with Spain, though neither the House 
of Commons nor the people were quite clear as to the justice of 
that war, now that they began to think a little more about the 
story of the Spanish match. But the King rushed into it hotly, 
raised money by illegal means to meet its expenses, and encountered 
a miserable failure at Cadiz, in the very first year of his reign. An 
expedition to Cadiz had been made in the hope of plunder, but as 
it was not successful, it was necessary to get a grant of money from 
the Parliament ; and when they met, in no very complying humour, 
the King told them, " to make haste to let him have it, or it would 
be the worse for themselves." Not put in a more complying 
humour by this, they impeached the King's favourite, the Duke 
of Buckingham, as the cause (which he undoubtedly was) of many 
great public grievances and wrongs. The King, to save him, dis- 
solved the Parliament without getting the money he wanted ; and 
when the Lords implored him to consider and grant a little delay, 
he replied, "No, not one minute." He then began to raise money 
for himself by the following means among others. 

He levied certain duties called tonnage and poundage which had 
not been granted by the Parliament, and could lawfully be levied 
by no other power; he called upon the seaport towns to furnish, 
and to pay all the cost for three months of, a fleet of armed ships ; 
and he required the people to unite in lending him large sums of 
money, the repayment of which was very doubtful. If the poor 
people refused, they were pressed as soldiers or sailors; if the 
gentry refused, they were sent to prison. Five gentlemen, named 
SiE Thomas Darnel, John Corbet, Walter Earl, John Hev- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 603 

ENINGHAM, and EvERARD Hampden", for refusing were taken up 
by a warrant of the King's privy council, and were sent to prison 
without any cause but the King's pleasure being stated for their 
imprisonment. Then the question came to be solemnly tried, whether 
this was not a violation of Magna Charta, and an encroachment by 
the King on the highest rights of the English people. His lawyers 
contended No, because to encroach upon the rights of the English 
people would be to do wrong, and the King could do no wrong. 
The accommodating judges decided in favour of this wicked non- 
sense ; and here was a fatal division between the King and the 
people. 

For all this, it became necessary to call another Parliament. 
The people, sensible of the danger in which their liberties were, 
chose for it those who were best known for their determined opposi- 
tion to the King ; but still the King, quite blinded by his deter- 
mination to carry everything before him, addressed them when 
they met, in a contemptuous manner, and just told them in so many 
words that he had only called them together because he wanted 
money. The Parliament, strong enough and resolute enough to 
know that they would lower his tone, cared little for what he said, 
and laid before him one of the great documents of history, which 
is called the Petition of Eight, requiring that the free men of 
England should no longer be called upon to lend the King money, 
and should no longer be pressed or imprisoned for refusing to do 
so; further, that the free men of England should no longer be 
seized by the King's special mandate or warrant, it being contrary 
to their rights and liberties and the laws of their country. At first 
the King returned an answer to this petition, in which he tried to 
shirk it altogether ; but, the House of Commons then showing their 
determination to go on with the impeachment of Buckingham the 
King in alarm returned an answer, giving his consent to all that 
was required of him. He not only afterwards departed from his 
word and honour on these points, over and over again, but, at this 
very time, he did the mean and dissembling act of publishing his 
first answer and not his second — merely that the people might 
suppose that the Parliament had not got the better of him. 

That pestilent Buckingham, to gratify his own wounded vanity, 
had by this time involved the country in war with France, as well as 
with Spain. For such miserable causes and such miserable creat- 
ures are wars sometimes made ! But he was destined to do little 
more mischief in this world. One morning, as he was going out of 
his house to his carriage, he turned to speak to a certain Colonel 
Fryer who was with him ; and he was violently stabbed with a 
knife, which the murderer left sticking in his heart. This hap- 



604 A CHILD'S HISTOEY OE ENGLAND. 

pened in his hall. He had had angry words up-stairs, just before, 
with some French gentlemen, who were immediately suspected by 
his servants, and had a close escape from being set upon and killed. 
In the midst of the noise, the real murderer, who had gone to the 
kitchen and might easily have got away, drew his sword and 
cried out, " I am the man ! " His name was John Felton, a 
Protestant and a retired officer in the army. He said he had had 
no personal ill-will to the duke, but had killed him as a curse to 
the country. He had aimed his blow well, for Buckingham had 
only had time to cry out, " Villain ! " and then he drew out the 
knife, fell against a table, and died. 

The Council made a mighty business of examining John Felton 
about this murder, though it was a plain case enough, one would 
think. He had come seventy miles to do it, he told them, and he 
did it for the reason he had declared ; if they put him upon the 
rack, as that noble Marquis of Dorset whom he saw before him, 
had the goodness to threaten, he gave that marquis warning, that 
he would accuse him as his accomplice ! The King was unpleas- 
antly anxious to have him racked, nevertheless ; but as the judges 
now found out that torture was contrary to the law of England 

— it is a pity they did not make the discovery a little sooner — 
John Felton was simply executed for the murder he had done. A 
murder it undoubtedly was, and not in the least to be defended : 
though he had freed England from one of the most profligate, con- 
temptible, and base court favourites to whom it has ever yielded. 

A very different man now arose. This was Sir Thomas Went- 
WORTH, a Yorkshire gentleman, who had sat in Parliament for a 
long time, and who had favoured arbitrary and haughty principles, 
but who had gone over to the people's side on receiving offence from 
Buckingham. The King, much wanting such a man — for, besides 
being naturally favourable to the King's cause, he had great abilities 

— made him first a Baron, and then a Viscount, and gave him high 
employment, and won him most completely. 

A Parliament, however, was still in existence, and was not to be 
won. On the twentieth of January, one thousand six hundred and 
twenty-nine. Sir John Eliot, a great man who had been active 
in the Petition of Right, brought forward other strong resolutions 
against the King's chief instruments, and called upon the Speaker 
to put them to the vote. To this the Speaker answered, " he was 
commanded otherwise by the King," and got up to leave the chair 

— which, according to the rules of the House of Commons would 
have obliged it to adjourn without doing anything more — when 
two members, named Mr. Hollis and Mr. Valentine, held him 
down. A scene of great confusion arose among the members ; and 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 605 

while many swords were drawn and flashing about, the King, who 
was kept informed of all that was going on, told the captain of 
his guard to go down to the House and force the doors. The reso- 
lutions were by that time, however, voted, and the House adjourned. 
Sir John Eliot and those two members who had held the Speaker 
down, were quickly summoned before the Council. As they claimed 
it to be their privilege not to answer out of Parliament for any- 
thing they had said in it, they were committed to the Tower. The 
King then went down and dissolved the Parliament, in a speech 
wherein he made mention of these gentlemen as " Vipers" — which 
did not do him much good that ever I have heard of. 

As they refused to gain their liberty by saying they were sorry 
for what they had done, the King, always remarkably unforgiv- 
ing, never overlooked their offence. When they demanded to be 
brought up before the Court of King's Bench, he even resorted to 
the meanness of having them moved about from prison to prison, 
so that the writs issued for that purpose should not legally find 
them. At last they came before the court and were sentenced to 
heavy fines, and to be imprisoned during the King's pleasure. 
When Sir John Eliot's health had quite given way, and he so 
longed for change of air and scene as to petition for his release, 
the King sent back the answer (worthy of his Sowship himself) 
that the petition was not humble enough. When he sent another 
petition by his young son, in which he pathetically offered to 
go back to prison when his health was restored, if he might be 
released for its recovery, the King still disregarded it. When 
he died in the Tower, and his children petitioned to be allowed to 
take his body down to Cornwall, there to lay it among the ashes 
of his forefathers, the King returned for answer, "Let Sir John 
Eliot's body be buried in the church of that parish where he died." 
All this was like a very little King indeed, I think. 

And now, for twelve long years, steadily pursuing his design 
of setting himself up and putting the people down, the King called 
no Parliament ; but ruled without one. If twelve thousand vol- 
umes were written in his praise (as a good many have been) it 
would still remain a fact, impossible to be denied, that for twelve 
years King Charles the First reigned in England unlawfully and 
despotically, seized upon his subjects' goods and money at his 
pleasure, and punished according to his unbridled will all who 
ventured to oppose him. It is a fashion with some people to think 
that this King's career was cut short ; but I must say myself that 
I think he ran a pretty long one. 

William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, was the King's 
right-hand man in the religious part of the putting down of the 



606 A CHILD'S HISTOKY OF ENGLAND. 

people's liberties. Laud, who was a sincere man, of large learning 
but small sense — for the two things sometimes go together in 
very different quantities — though a Protestant, held opinions so 
near those of the Catholics, that the Pope wanted to make a Car- 
dinal of him, if he would have accepted that favour. He looked 
upon vows, robes, lighted candles, images, and so forth, as amaz- 
ingly important in religious ceremonies; and he brought in an 
immensity of bowing and candle-snuffing. He also regarded arch- 
bishops and bishops as a sort of miraculous persons, and was 
inveterate in the last degree against any who thought otherwise. 
Accordingly, he offered up thanks to Heaven, and was in a state 
of much pious pleasure, when a Scotch clergyman named Leigh- 
ton, was pilloried, whipped, branded in the cheek, and had one 
of his ears cut off and one of his nostrils slit, for calling bishops 
trumpery and the inventions of men. He originated on a Sunday 
morning the prosecution of William Prynne, a barrister who was 
of similar opinions, and who was fined a thousand pounds ; who 
was pilloried; who had his ears cut off on two occasions — one 
ear at a time — and who was imprisoned for life. He highly 
approved of the punishment of Doctor Bastwick, a physician ; 
who was also fined a thousand pounds ; and who afterwards had 
his ears cut off, and was imprisoned for life. These were gentle 
methods of persuasion, some will tell you : I think, they were 
rather calculated to be alarming to the people. 

In the money part of the putting down of the people's liberties, 
the King was equally gentle, as some will tell you : as I think, 
equally alarming. He levied those duties of tonnage and pound- 
age, and increased them as he thought fit. He granted monopolies 
to companies of merchants on their paying him for them, notwith- 
standing the great complaints that had, for years and years, been 
made on the subject of monopolies. He fined the people for dis- 
obeying proclamations issued by his Sowship in direct violation of 
law. He revived the detested Forest laws, and took private prop- 
erty to himself as his forest right. Above all, he determined to 
have what was called Ship Money ; that is to say, money for the 
support of the fleet — not only from the seaports, but from all 
the counties of England: having found out that, in. some ancient 
time or other, all the counties paid it. The grievance of this ship 
money being somewhat too strong, John Chambers, a citizen of 
London, refused to pay his part of it. For this the Lord Mayor 
ordered John Chambers to prison, and for that John Chambers 
brought a suit against the Lord Mayor. Lord Say, also, behaved 
like a real nobleman, and declared he would not pay. But, the 
sturdiest and best opponent of the ship money was John Hamp- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 607 

DEN, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, who had sat among the 
"vipers" in the House of Commons when there was such a thing, 
and who had been the bosom friend of Sir John Eliot. This case 
was tried before the twelve judges in the Court of Exchequer, and 
again the King's lawyers said it was impossible that ship money 
could be wrong, because the King could do no wrong, however 
hard he tried — and he really did try very hard during these 
twelve years. Seven of the judges said that was quite true, and 
Mr. Hampden was bound to pay : five of the judges said that was 
quite false, and Mr. Hampden was not bound to pay. So, the 
King triumphed (as he thought), by making Hampden the most 
popular man in England; where matters were getting to that 
height now, that many honest Englishmen could not endure their 
country, and sailed away across the seas to found a colony in 
Massachusetts Bay in America. It is said that Hampden himself 
and his relation Oliver Ceomavell were going with a company 
of such voyagers, and were actually on board ship, when they were 
stopped by a proclamation, prohibiting sea captains to carry out 
such passengers without the royal license. But ! it would have 
been well for the King if he had let them go ! 

This was the state of England. If Laud had been a madman 
just broke loose, he could not have done more mischief than he did 
in Scotland. In his endeavours (in which he was seconded by the 
King, then in person in that part of his dominions) to force his 
own ideas of bishops, and his own religious forms and ceremonies, 
upon the Scotch, he roused that nation to a perfect frenzy. They 
formed a solemn league, which they called The Covenant, for the 
preservation of their own religious forms; they rose in arms 
throughout the whole country ; they summoned all their men to 
prayers and sermons twice a day by beat of drum; they sang 
psalms, in which they compared their enemies to all the evil spirits 
that ever were heard of; and they solemnly vowed to smite them 
with the sword. At first the King tried force, then treaty, then 
a Scottish Parliament which did not answer at all. Then he tried 
the Earl of Strafford, formerly Sir Thomas Wentworth ; who, 
as Lord Wentworth, had been governing Ireland. He, too, had 
carried it with a very high hand there, though to the benefit and 
prosperity of that country. 

Strafford and Laud were for conquering the Scottish people by 
force of arms. Other lords who were taken into council, recom- 
mended that a Parliament should at last be called ; to which the 
King unwillingly consented. So, on the thirteenth of April, one 
thousand six hundred and forty, that then strange sight, a Parlia- 
ment, was seen at Westminster. It is called the Short Parliament, 



608 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

for it lasted a very little while. While the members were all look- 
ing at one another, doubtful who would dare to speak, Mr. Pym 
arose and set forth all that the King had done unlawfully during 
the past twelve years, and what was the position to which England 
was reduced. This great example set, other members took courage 
and spoke the truth freely, though with great patience and modera- 
tion. The King, a little frightened, sent to say that if they would 
grant him a certain sum on certain terms, no more ship money 
should be raised. They debated the matter for two days ; and 
then, as they would not give him all he asked without promise or 
inquiry, he dissolved them. 

But they knew very well that he must have a Parliament now ; 
and he began to make that discovery too, though rather late in the 
day. Wherefore, on the twenty-fourth of September, being then 
at York with an army collected against the Scottish people, but his 
own men sullen and discontented like the rest of the nation, the 
King told the great Council of the Lords, whom he had called to 
meet him there, that he would summon another Parliament to 
assemble on the third of November. The soldiers of the Covenant 
had now forced their way into England and had taken possession 
of the northern counties, where the coals are got. As it would 
never do to be without coals, and as the King's troops could make 
no head against the Covenanters so full of gloomy zeal, a truce was 
made, and a treaty with Scotland was taken into consideration. 
Meanwhile the northern counties paid the Covenanters to leave the 
coals alone, and keep quiet. 

We have now disposed of the Short Parliament. We have next 
to see what memorable things were done by the Long one. 

Second Paet. 

The Long Parliament assembled on the third of November, one 
thousand six hundred and forty-one. That day week the Earl of 
Strafford arrived from York, very sensible that the spirited and de- 
termined men who formed that Parliament were no friends towards 
him, who had not only deserted the cause of the people, but who 
had on all occasions opposed himself to their liberties. The King 
told him, for his comfort, that the Parliament " should not hurt 
one hair of his head." But, on the very next day Mr. Pym, in the 
House of Commons, and with great solemnity, impeached the Earl 
of Strafford as a traitor. He was immediately taken into custody 
and fell from his proud height. 

It was the twenty-second of March before he was brought to 
trial in Westminster Hall; where, although he was very ill and 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 609 

sujffered great pain, he defended himself with such ability and maj- 
esty, that it was doubtful whether he would not get the best of it. 
But on the thirteenth day of the trial, Pym produced in the House 
of Commons a copy of some notes of a council, found by young Sir 
Harry Vane in a red velvet cabinet belonging to his father (Sec- 
retary Vane, who sat at the council-table with the earl), in which 
Strafford had distinctly told the King that he was free from all 
rules and obligations of government, and might do with his people 
whatever he liked ; and in which he had added — "You have an army 
in Ireland that you may employ to reduce this kingdom to obedi- 
ence." It was not clear whether by the words " this kingdom," 
he had really meant England or Scotland ; but the Parliament con- 
tended that he meant England, and this was treason. At the same 
sitting of the House of Commons it was resolved to bring in a bill 
of attainder declaring the treason to have been committed : in pref- 
erence to proceeding with the trial by impeachment, which would 
have required the treason to be proved. 

So, a bill was brought in at once, was carried through the House 
of Commons by a large majority, and was sent up to the House of 
Lords. While it was still uncertain whether the House of Lords 
would pass it and the King consent to it, Pym disclosed to the 
House of Commons that the King and Queen had both been plot- 
ting with the officers of the army to bring up the soldiers and 
control the Parliament, and also to introduce two hundred soldiers 
into the Tower of London to effect the earl's escape. The plotting 
with the army was revealed by one George Gorijstg, the son of a 
lord of that name : a bad fellow who was one of the original plot- 
ters, and turned traitor. The King had actually given his warrant 
for the admission of the two hundred men into the Tower, and 
they would have got in too, but for the refusal of the governor — 
a sturdy Scotchman of the name of Balfour — to admit them. 
These matters being made public, great numbers of people began 
to riot outside the Houses of Parliament, and to cry out for the 
execution of the Earl of Strafford, as one of the King's chief instru- 
ments against them. The bill passed the House of Lords while 
the people were in this state of agitation, and was laid before the 
King for his assent, together with another bill declaring that the 
Parliament then assembled should not be dissolved or adjourned 
without their own consent. The King — not unwilling to save a 
faithful servant, though he had no great attachment for him — was 
in some doubt what to do ; but he gave his consent to both bills, 
although he in his heart believed that the bill against the Earl of 
Strafford was unlawful and unjust. The Earl had written to him, 
telling him that he was willing to die for his sake. But he had 
2r 



610 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

not expected that his royal master would take him at his word 
quite so readily ; for, when he heard his doom, he laid his hand 
upon his heart, and said, " Put not your trust in Princes ! " 

The King, who never could be straightforward and plain, through 
one single day or through one single sheet of paper, wrote a letter 
to the Lords, and sent it by the young Prince of Wales, entreating 
them to prevail with the Commons that " that unfortunate man 
should fulfil the natural course of his life in a close imprisonment." 
In a postscript to the very same letter, he added, " If he must die, 
it were charity to reprieve him till Saturday." If there had been 
any doubt of his fate, this weakness and meanness would have 
settled it. The very next day, which was the twelfth of May, he 
was brought out to be beheaded on Tower Hill. 

Archbishop Laud, who had been so fond of having people's ears 
cropped off and their noses slit, was now confined in the Tower 
too ; and when the earl went by his window to his death, he was 
there, at his request, to give him his blessing. They had been 
great friends in the King's cause, and the earl had written to him 
in the days of their power that he thought it would be an admir- 
able thing to have Mr. Hampden publicly whipped for refusing to 
pay the ship money. However, those high and mighty doings were 
over now, and the earl went his way to death with dignity and 
heroism. The governor wished him to get into a coach at the 
Tower gate, for fear the people should tear him to pieces j but he 
said it was all one to him whether he died by the axe or by the 
people's hands. So, he walked, with a firm tread and a stately 
look, and sometimes pulled off his hat to them as he passed along. 
They were profoundly quiet. He made a speech on the scaffold 
from some notes he had prepared (the paper was found lying there 
after his head was struck off), and one blow of the axe killed him, 
in the forty-ninth year of his age. 

This bold and daring act, the Parliament accompanied by other 
famous measures, all originating (as even this did) in the King's 
having so grossly and so long abused his power. The name of 
Delinquents was applied to all sheriffs and other oflBicers who 
had been concerned in raising the ship money, or any other money, 
from the people, in an unlawful manner ; the Hampden judgment 
was reversed ; the judges who had decided against Hampden were 
called upon to give large securities that they would take such con- 
sequences as Parliament might impose upon them ; and one was 
arrested as he sat in High Court, and carried off to prison. Laud 
was impeached; the unfortunate victims whose ears had been 
cropped and whose noses had been slit, were brought out of prison 
in triumph; and a bill was passed declaring that a Parliament 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 611 

should be called every third year, and that if the King and the 
King's oflficers did not call it, the people should assemble of them- 
selves and summon it, as of their own right and power. Great 
illuminations and rejoicings took place over all these things, and 
the country was wildly excited. That the Parliament took advan- 
tage of this excitement and stirred them up by every means, there 
is no doubt ; but you are always to remember those twelve long 
years, during which the King had tried so hard whether he really 
could do any wrong or not. 

All this time there was a great religious outcry against the right 
of the Bishops to sit in Parliament ; to which the Scottish people 
particularly objected. The English were divided on this subject, 
and, partly on this account and partly because they had had foolish 
expectations that the Parliament would be able to take off nearly 
all the taxes, numbers of them sometimes wavered and inclined 
towards the King. 

I believe myself, that if, at this or almost any other period of 
his life, the King could have been trusted by any man not out of 
his senses, he might have saved himself and kept his throne. But, 
on the English army being disbanded, he plotted with the officers 
again, as he had done before, and established the fact beyond all 
doubt by putting his signature of approval to a petition against 
the Parliamentary leaders, which was drawn up by certain officers. 
When the Scottish army was disbanded, he went to Edinburgh in 
four days — which was going very fast at that time — to plot 
again, and so darkly too, that it is difficult to decide what his whole 
object was. Some suppose that he wanted to gain over the Scottish 
Parliament, as he did in fact gain over, by presents and favours, many 
Scottish lords and men of power. Some think that he went to get 
proofs against the Parliamentary leaders in England of their having 
treasonably invited the Scottish people to come and help them. 
With whatever object he went to Scotland, he did little good by 
going. At the instigation of the Earl of Montrose, a desperate 
man who was then in prison for plotting, he tried to kidnap three 
Scottish lords who escaped. A committee of the Parliament at 
home, who had followed to watch him, writing an account of this 
Incident, as it was called, to the Parliament, the Parliament 
made a fresh stir about it ; were, or feigned to be, much alarmed 
for themselves : and wrote to the Earl of Essex, the commander- 
in-chief, for a guard to protect them. 

It is not absolutely proved that the King plotted in Ireland be- 
sides, but it is very probable that he did, and that the Queen did, 
and that he had some wild hope of gaining the Irish people over to 
his side by favouring a rise among them. Whether or no, they did 



612 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

rise in a most brutal and savage rebellion ; in which, encouraged 
by their priests, they committed such atrocities upon numbers of 
the English, of both sexes and of all ages, as nobody could believe, 
but for their being related on oath by eye-witnesses. Whether one 
hundred thousand or two hundred thousand Protestants were mur- 
dered in this outbreak, is uncertain ; but, ihat it was as ruthless 
and barbarous an outbreak as ever was known among any savage 
people, is certain. 

The King came home from Scotland, determined to make a great 
struggle for his lost power. He believed that, through his presents 
and favours, Scotland would take no part against him; and the 
Lord Mayor of London received him with such a magnificent din- 
ner that he thought he must have become popular again in England. 
It would take a good many Lord Mayors, however, to make a peo- 
ple, and the King soon found himself mistaken. 

Not so soon, though, but that there was a great opposition in the 
Parliament to a celebrated paper put forth by Pym and Hampden 
and the rest, called " The Eemonsteance," which set forth all the 
illegal acts that the King had ever done, but politely laid the blame 
of them on his bad advisers. Even when it was passed and pre- 
sented to him, the King still thought himself strong enough to dis- 
charge Balfour from his command in the Tower, and to put in his 
place a man of bad character ; to whom the Commons instantly 
objected, and whom he was obliged to abandon. At this time, the 
old outcry about the Bishops became louder than ever, and the old 
Archbishop of York was so near being murdered as he went down 
to the House of Lords — being laid hold of by the mob and vio- 
lently knocked about, in return for very foolishly scolding a shrill 
boy who was yelping out " No Bishops ! " — that he sent for all 
the Bishops who were in town, and proposed to them to sign a dec- 
laration that, as they could no longer without danger to their lives 
attend their duty in Parliament, they protested against the lawful- 
ness of everything done in their absence. This they asked the King 
to send to the House of Lords, which he did. Then the House of 
Commons impeached the whole party of Bishops and sent them off 
to the Tower. 

Taking no warning from this ; but encouraged by there being 
a moderate party in the Parliament who objected to these strong 
measures, the King, on the third of January, one thousand six hun- 
dred and forty-two, took the rashest step that ever was taken by 
mortal man. 

Of his own accord and without advice, he sent the Attorney- 
General to the House of Lords, to accuse of treason certain mem- 
bers of Parliament who as popular leaders were the most obnoxious 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 613 

to him ; Lord Kimbolton, Sir Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Hol- 
Lis, John Pym (they used to call him King Pym, he possessed such 
power and looked so big), John Hampden, and William Strode. 
The houses of those members he caused to be entered, and their 
papers to be sealed up. At the same time, he sent a messenger to 
the House of Commons demanding to have the five gentlemen who 
were members of that House immediately produced. To this the 
House replied that they should appear as soon as there was any legal 
charge against them, and immediately adjourned. 

Next day, the House of Commons send into the City to let the 
Lord Mayor know that their privileges are invaded by the King, 
and that there is no safety for anybody or anything. Then, when 
the five members are gone out of the way, down comes the King 
himself, with all his guard and from two to three hundred gentle- 
men and soldiers, of whom the greater part were armed. These he 
leaves in the hall ; and then, with his nephew at his side, goes into 
the House, takes off his hat, and walks up to the Speaker's, chair. 
The Speaker leaves it, the King stands in front of it, looks about 
him steadily for a little while, and says he has come for those five 
members. No one speaks, and then he calls John Pym by name. 
No one speaks, and then he calls Denzil Hollis by name. No one 
speaks, and then he asks the Speaker of the House where those 
five members are ? The Speaker, answering on his knee, nobly re- 
plies that he is the servant of that House, and that he has neither 
eyes to see, nor tongue to speak, anything but what the House 
commands him. Upon this, the King, beaten from that time ever- 
more, replies that he will seek them himself, for they have committed 
treason ; and goes out, with his hat in his hand, amid some audible 
murmurs from the members. 

No words can describe the hurry that arose out of doors when all 
this was known. The five members had gone for safety to a house 
in Colemen-street, in the City, where they were guarded all night ; 
and indeed the whole city watched in arms like an army. At ten 
o'clock in the morning, the King already frightened at what he had 
done, came to the Guildhall, with only half a dozen lords, and made 
a speech to the people, hoping they would not shelter those whom 
he accused of treason. Next day, he issued a proclamation for the 
apprehension of the five members ; but the Parliament minded it so 
little that they made great arrangements for having them brought 
down to Westminster in great state, five days afterwards. The 
King was so alarmed now at his own imprudence, if not for his own 
safety, that he left his palace at Whitehall, and went away with 
his Queen and children to Hampton Court. 

It was the eleventh of May, when the five members were car- 



614 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ried in state and triumph to Westminster. They were taken by- 
water. The river could not be seen for the boats on it ; and the 
five members were hemmed in by barges full of men and great guns, 
ready to protect them, at any cost. Along the Strand a large body 
of the train-bands of London, under their commander, Skippon, 
marched to be ready to assist the little fleet. Beyond them, came 
a crowd who choked the streets, roaring incessantly about the 
Bishops and the Papists, and crying out contemptuously as they 
passed Whitehall, "What has become of the King?" With this 
great noise outside the House of Commons, and with great silence 
within, Mr. Pym rose and informed the House of the great kind- 
ness with which they had been received in the City. Upon that, 
the House called the sherifi's in and thanked them, and requested 
the train-bands, under their commander Skippon, to guard the 
House of Commons every day. Then, came four thousand men on 
horseback out of Buckinghamshire, offering their services as a guard 
too, and bearing a petition to the King, complaining of the injury 
that had been done to Mr. Hampden, who was their county man 
and much beloved and honoured. 

When the King set off for Hampton Court, the gentlemen and 
soldiers who had been with him followed him out of town as far as 
Kingston-upon-Thames ; next day. Lord Digby came to them from 
the King at Hampton Court, in his coach and six, to inform them 
that the King accepted their protection. This, the Parliament 
said, was making war against the kingdom, and Lord Digby fled 
abroad. The Parliament then immediately applied themselves to 
getting hold of the military power of the country, well knowing that 
the King was already trying hard to use it against them, and that he 
had secretly sent the Earl of Newcastle to Hull, to secure a valuable 
magazine of arms and gunpowder that was there. In those times, 
every county had its own magazines of arms and powder, for its own 
train-bands or militia ; so, the Parliament brought in a bill claim- 
ing the right (which up to this time had belonged to the King) of 
appointing the Lord Lieutenants of counties, who commanded these 
train-bands ; also, of having all the forts, castles, and garrisons in 
the kingdom, put into the hands of such governors as they, the 
Parliament, could confide in. It also passed a law depriving the 
Bishops of their votes. The King gave his assent to that bill, but 
would not abandon the right of appointing the Lord Lieutenants, 
though he said he was willing to appoint such as might be sug- 
gested to him by the Parliament. When the Earl of Pembroke 
asked him whether he would not give way on that question for a , 
time, he said, " By God ! not for one hour ! " and upon this he and [ 
the Parliament went to war. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 615 

His young daughter was betrothed to the Prince of Orange. On 
pretence of taking her to the country of her future husband, the 
Queen was already got safely away to Holland, there to pawn 
the Crown jewels for money to raise an army on the King's side. 
The Lord Admiral being sick, the House of Commons now named 
the Earl of Warwick to hold his place for a year. The King named 
another gentleman ; the House of Commons took its own way, and 
the Earl of Warwick became Lord Admiral without the King's con- 
sent. The Parliament sent orders down to Hull to have that maga- 
zine removed to London ; the King went down to Hull to take it 
himself. The citizens would not admit him into the town, and 
the governor would not admit him into the castle. The Parliament 
resolved that whatever the two Houses passed, and the King would 
not consent to, should be called an Oedinance, and should be as 
much a law as if he did consent to it. The King protested against 
this, and gave notice that these ordinances were not to be obeyed. 
The King, attended by the majority of the House of Peers, and by 
many members of the House of Commons, established himself at 
York. The Chancellor went to him with the Great Seal, and the 
Parliament made a new Great Seal. The Queen sent over a ship 
full of arms and ammunition, and the King issued letters to borrow 
money at high interest. The Parliament raised twenty regiments 
of foot and seventy -five troops of horse ; and the people willingly 
aided them with their money, plate, jewellery, and trinkets — the 
married women even with their wedding-rings. Every member of 
Parliament who could raise a troop or a regiment in his own part of 
the country, dressed it according to his taste and in his own colours, 
and commanded it. Foremost among them all, Oliver Ceomwell 
raised a troop of horse — thoroughly in earnest and thoroughly well 
armed — who were, perhaps, the best soldiers that ever were seen. 

In some of their proceedings, this famous Parliament passed the 
bounds of previous law and custom, yielded to and favoured riotous 
assemblages of the people, and acted tyrannically in imprisoning 
some who differed from the popular leaders. But again, you are 
always to remember that the twelve years during which the King 
had had his own wilful way, had gone before ; and that nothing 
could make the times what they might, could, would, or should 
have been, if those twelve years had never rolled away. 

Thied Paet. 

I shall not try to relate the particulars of the great civil war 
between King Charles the First and the Long Parliament, which 
lasted nearly four years, and a full account of which would fill many 



616 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

large books. It was a sad thing that Englishmen should once 
more be fighting against Englishmen on English ground ; but, it is 
some consolation to know that on both sides there was great human- 
ity, forbearance, and honour. The soldiers of the Parliament were 
far more remarkable for these good qualities than the soldiers of 
the King (many of whom fought for mere pay without much caring 
for the cause) ; but those of the nobility and gentry who were on 
the King's side were so brave, and so faithful to him, that their 
conduct cannot but command our highest admiration. Among 
them were great numbers of Catholics, who took the royal side 
because the Queen was so strongly of their persuasion. 

The King might have distinguished some of these gallant spirits, 
if he had been as generous a spirit himself, by giving them the 
command of his army. Instead of that, however, true to his old 
high notions of royalty, he entrusted it to his two nephews, Peince 
KuPERT and Peince Maueice, who were of royal blood and came 
over from abroad to help him. It might have been better for him 
if they had stayed away; since Prince Kupert was an impetuous 
hot-headed fellow, whose only idea was to dash into battle at all 
times and seasons, and lay about him. 

The general-in-chief of the Parliamentary army was the Earl of 
Essex, a gentleman of honour and an excellent soldier. A little 
while before the war broke out, there had been some rioting at 
Westminster between certain officious law students and noisy sol- 
diers, and the shopkeepers and their apprentices, and the general 
people in the streets. At that time the King's friends called the 
crowd. Roundheads, because the apprentices wore short hair ; the 
crowd, in return, called their opponents Cavaliers, meaning that 
they were a blustering set, who pretended to be very military. 
These two words now began to be used to distinguish the two sides 
in the civil war. The Royalists also called the Parliamentary men 
Rebels and Rogues, while the Parliamentary men called them Ma- 
lignants, and spoke of themselves as the Godly, the Honest, and so 
forth. 

The war broke out at Portsmouth, where that double traitor 
Goring had again gone over to the King and w^as besieged by the 
Parliamentary troops. Upon this, the King proclaimed the Earl 
of Essex and the officers serving under him, traitors, and called 
upon his loyal subjects to meet him in arms at Nottingham on the 
twenty-fifth of August. But his loyal subjects came about him in 
scanty numbers, and it was a windy gloomy day, and the Royal 
Standard got blown down, and the whole affair was very melan- 
choly. The chief engagements after this, took place in the vale of 
the Red Horse near Banbury, at Brentford, at Devizes, at Chal- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 617 

grave Field (where Mr. Hampden was so sorely wounded while 
fighting at the head of his men, that he died within a week), at 
Newbury (in which battle Lord Falkland, one of the best noble- 
men on the King's side, was killed), at Leicester, at Naseby, at 
Winchester, at Marston Moor near York, at Newcastle, and in 
many other parts of England and Scotland. These battles were 
attended with various successes. At one time, the King was vic- 
torious; at another time, the Parliament. But almost all the 
great and busy towns were against the King ; and when it was 
considered necessary to fortify London, all ranks of people, from 
labouring men and women, up to lords and ladies, worked hard 
together with heartiness and good will. The most distinguished 
leaders on the ParHamentary side were Hampden, Sir Thomas 
Fairfax, and, above all, Oliver Cromwell, and his son-in-law 
Ireton. 

During the whole of this war, the people, to whom it was very ex- 
pensive and irksome, and to whom it was made the more distressing 
by almost every family being divided — some of its members attach"^ 
ing themselves to one side and some to the other — were over and 
over again most anxious for peace. So were some of the best men 
m each cause. Accordingly, treaties of peace were discussed between 
commissioners from the Parliament and the King ; at York, at Ox- 
ford (where the King held a little Parliament of his own),' and at 
Uxbridge. But they came to nothing. In all these negotiations, 
and m all his difficulties, the King showed himself at his best. He 
was courageous, cool, self-possessed, and clever ; but, the old taint of 
his character was always in him, and he was never for one single 
moment to be trusted. Lord Clarendon, the historian, one of his 
highest admirers, supposes that he had unhappily promised the 
Queen never to make peace without her consent, and that this must 
often be taken as his excuse. He never kept his word from night 
to morning. He signed a cessation of hostilities with the blood- 
stamed Irish rebels for a sum of money, and invited the Irish regi- 
ments over, to help him against the Parliament. In the battle of 
Naseby, his cabinet was seized and was found to contain a corre- 
spondence with the Queen, in which he expressly told her that he 
had deceived the Parliament — a mongrel Parliament, he called it 
now, as an improvement on his old term of vipers — in pretending 
to recognise it and to treat with it ; and from which it further ap- 
peared that he had long been in secret treaty with the Duke of 
Lorraine for a foreign army of ten thousand men. Disappointed in 
this, he sent a most devoted friend of his, the Earl of Glamorgan, 
to Ireland, to conclude a secret treaty with the Catholic powers, to 
send him an Irish army of ten thousand men ; in return for which 



618 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

he was to bestow great favours on the Catholic religion. And, 
when this treaty was discovered in the carriage of a fighting Irish 
Archbishop who was killed in one of the many skirmishes of those 
days, he basely denied and deserted his attached friend, the earl, 
on his being charged with high treason ; and — even worse than 
this — had left blanks in the secret instructions he gave him with 
his own kingly hand, expressly that he might thus save himself 

At last, on the twenty-seventh day of April, one thousand six 
hundred and forty-six, the King found himself in the city of Oxford, 
so surrounded by the Parliamentary army who were closing in upon 
him on all sides that he felt that if he would escape he must delay 
no longer. So, that night, having altered the cut of his hair and 
beard, he was dressed up as a servant and put upon a horse with 
a cloak strapped behind him, and rode out of the town behind one 
of his own faithful followers, with a clergyman of that country who 
knew the road well, for a guide. He rode towards London as far 
as Harrow, and then altered his plans and resolved, it would seem, 
to go to the Scottish camp. The Scottish men had been invited 
over to help the Parliamentary army, and had a large force then in 
England. The King was so desperately intriguing in everything he 
did, that it is doubtful what he exactly meant by this step. He 
took it, anyhow, and delivered himself up to the Eael of Leven, 
the Scottish general-in-chief, who treated him as an honourable pris- 
oner. Negotiations between the Parliament on the one hand and 
the Scottish authorities on the other, as to what should be done 
with him, lasted until the following February. Then, when the 
King had refused to the Parliament the concession of that old mili- 
tia point for twenty years, and had refused to Scotland the recogni- 
tion of its Solemn League and Covenant, Scotland got a handsome 
^ sum for its army and its help, and the King into the bargain. He 
was taken, by certain Parliamentary commissioners appointed to 
receive him, to one of his own houses, called Holmby House, near 
Althorpe, in Northamptonshire. 

While the civil war was still in progress, John Pym died, and 
was buried with great honour in Westminster Abbey — not with 
greater honour than he deserved, for the liberties of Englishmen 
owe a mighty debt to Pym and Hampden. The war was but newly 
over when the Earl of Essex died, of an illness brought on by his 
having overheated himself in a stag hunt in Windsor Forest. He, 
too, was buried in Westminster Abbey, with great state. I wish 
it were not necessary to add that Archbishop Laud died upon the 
scaffold when the war was not yet done. His trial lasted in all 
nearly a year, and, it being doubtful even then whether the charges 
brought against him amounted to treason, the odious old contrivance 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 619 

of the worst kings was resorted to, and a bill of attainder was brought 
in against him. He was a violently prejudiced and mischievous 
person ; had had strong ear-cropping and nose-splitting propensities, 
as you know ; and had done a world of harm. But he died peace- 
ably, and like a brave old man. 



Fourth Part. 

When the Parliament had got the King into their hands, they 
became very anxious to get rid of their army, in which Oliver Crom- 
well had begun to acquire great power ; not only because of his 
courage and high abilities, but because he professed to be very sin- 
cere in the Scottish sort of Puritan religion that was then exceed- 
ingly popular among the soldiers. They were as much opposed to 
the Bishops as to the Pope himself ; and the very privates, drum- 
mers, and trumpeters had such an inconvenient habit of starting 
up and preaching long-winded discourses, that I would not have 
belonged to that army on any account. 

So, the Parliament, being far from sure but that the army might 
begin to preach and fight against them now it had nothing else to 
do, proposed to disband the greater part of it, to send another part 
to serve in Ireland against the rebels, and to keep only a small 
force in England. But, the army would not consent to be broken 
up, except upon its own conditions ; and, when the Parliament 
showed an intention of compelling it, it acted for itself in an unex- 
pected manner. A certain cornet, of the name of Joice, arrived 
at Holmby House one night, attended by four hundred horsemen, 
went into the King's room with his hat in one hand and a pistol 
in the other, and told the King that he had come to take him 
away. The King was willing enough to go, and only stipulated 
that he should be publicly required to do so next morning. Next 
morning, accordingly, he appeared on the top of the steps of the 
house, and asked Cornet Joice before his men and the guard set 
there by the Parliament, what authority he had for taking him 
away ? To this Cornet Joice replied, " The authority of the army." 
" Have you a written commission 1 " said the King. Joice, point- 
ing to his four hundred men on horseback, replied, " That is my 
commission." "Well," said the King, smiling, as if he were 
pleased, " I never before read such a commission ; but it is written 
in fair and legible characters. This is a company of as handsome 
proper gentlemen as I have seen a long while." He was asked 
where he would Hke to live, and he said at Newmarket. So, to 
Newmarket he and Cornet Joice and the four hundred horsemen 



620 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

rode ; the King remarking, in the same smiling way, that he could 
ride as far at a spell as Cornet Joice, or any man there. 

The King quite believed, I think, that the army were his friends. 
He said as much to Fairfax when that general, Oliver Cromwell, 
and Ireton, went to persuade him to return to the custody of the 
Parliament. He preferred to remain as he was, and resolved to 
remain as he was. And when the army moved nearer and nearer 
London to frighten the Parliament into yielding to their demands, 
they took the King with them. It was a deplorable thing that 
England should be at the mercy of a great body of soldiers with 
arms in their hands ; but the King certainly favoured them at 
this important time of his life, as compared with the more lawful 
power that tried to control him. It must be added, however, that 
they treated him, as yet, more respectfully and kindly than the 
Parliament had done. They allowed him to be attended by 
his own servants, to be splendidly entertained at various houses, 
and to see his children — at Cavesham House, near Reading — 
for two days. Whereas, the Parliament had been rather hard with 
him, and had only allowed him to ride out and play at bowls. 

It is much to be believed that if the King could have been 
trusted, even at this time, he might have been saved. Even 
Oliver Cromwell expressly said that he did believe that no man 
could enjoy his possessions in peace, unless the King had his rights. 
He was not unfriendly toward the King ; he had been present when 
he received his children, and had been much aJQTected by the pitiable 
nature of the scene ; he saw the King often ; he frequently walked 
and talked with him in the long galleries and pleasant gardens of 
the Palace at Hampton Court, whither he was now removed ; and 
in all this risked something of his influence with the army. But, 
the King was in secret hopes of help from the Scottish people ; and 
the moment he was encouraged to join them he began to be cool 
to his new friends, the army, and to tell the officers that they 
could not possibly do without him. At the very time, too, when 
he was promising to make Cromwell and Ireton noblemen, if they 
would help him up to his old height, he was writing to the Queen 
that he meant to hang them. They both afterwards declared that 
they had been privately informed that such a letter would be found, 
on a certain evening, sewed up in a saddle which would be taken 
to the Blue Boar in Holborn to be sent to Dover ; and that they 
went there, disguised as common soldiers, and sat drinking in the 
inn-yard until a man came with the saddle, which they ripped up 
with their knives, and therein found the letter. I see little reason 
to doubt the story. It is certain that Oliver Cromwell told one 
of the King's most faithful followers that the King could not be 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 621 

trusted, and that he would not be answerable if anything amiss 
were to happen to him. Still, even after that, he kept a promise 
he had made to the King, by letting him know that there was a 
plot with a certain portion of the army to seize him. I believe 
that, in fact, he sincerely wanted the King to escape abroad, and 
so to be got rid of without more trouble or danger. That Oliver 
himself had work enough with the army is pretty plain ; for some 
of the troops wer.e so mutinous against him, and against those who 
acted with him at this time, that he found it necessary to have one 
man shot at the head of his regiment to overawe the rest. 

The King, when he received Oliver's warning, made his escape 
from Hampton Court ; after some indecision and uncertainty, he 
went to Carisbrooke Castle in the Isle of Wight. At first, he 
was pretty free there ; but, even there, he carried on a pretended 
treaty with the Parliament, while he was really treating with com- 
missioners from Scotland to send an army into England to take 
his part. When he broke off this treaty with the Parliament (hav- 
ing settled with Scotland) and was treated as a prisoner, his treat- 
ment was not changed too soon, for he had plotted to escape that 
very night to a ship sent by the Queen, which was lying off the 
island. 

He was doomed to be disappointed in his hopes from Scotland. 
The agreement he had made with the Scottish Commissioners was 
not favourable enough to the religion of that country to please the 
Scottish clergy ; and they preached against it. The consequence 
was, that the army raised in Scotland and sent over, was too small 
to do much ; and that, although it was helped by a rising of the 
Royalists in England and by good soldiers from Ireland, it could make 
no head against the Parliamentary army under such men as Crom- 
well and Fairfax. The King's eldest son, the Prince of Whales, 
came over from Holland with nineteen ships (a part of the English 
fleet having gone over to him) to help his father; but nothing 
came of his voyage, and he was fain to return. The most remark- 
able event of this second civil war was the cruel execution by the 
Parliamentary General, of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George 
Lisle, two grand Royalist generals, who had bravely defended 
Colchester under every disadvantage of famine and distress for 
nearly three months. When Sir Charles Lucas was shot, Sir 
George Lisle kissed his body, and said to the soldiers who were to 
shoot him, " Come nearer, and make sure of me." " I warrant 
you, Sir George," said one of the soldiers, "we shall hit you." 
"AyV he returned with a smile, "but I have been nearer to 
you, my friends, many a time, and you have missed me." 

The Parliament, after being fearfully bullied by the army — 



622 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

who demanded to have seven members whom they disUked given 
up to them — had voted that they would have nothmg more to do 
with the King. On the conclusion, hov/ever, of this second civil 
war (which did not last more than six months), they appointed 
commissioners to treat with him. The King, then so far released 
again as to be allowed to live in a private house at Newport in the 
Isle of Wight, managed his own part of the negotiation with a 
sense that was admired by all who saw him, and gave up, in the 
end, all that was asked of him — even yielding (which he had 
steadily refused, so far) to the temporary abolition of the bishops, 
and the transfer of their Church land to the Crown. Still, with 
his old fatal vice upon him, when his best friends joined the com- 
missioners in beseeching him to yield all those points as the only 
means of saving himself from the army, he was plotting to escape 
from the island ; he was holding correspondence with his friends 
and the Catholics in Ireland, though declaring that he was not ; 
and he was writing, with his own hand, that in what he yielded he 
meant nothing but to get time to escape. 

Matters were at this pass when the army, resolved to defy the 
Parliament, marched up to London. The Parliament, not afraid 
of them now, and boldly led by HoUis, voted that the King's con- 
cessions were sufiSicient ground for settling the peace of the king- 
dom. Upon that, Colonel Rich and Colonel Pride went down 
to the House of Commons with a regiment of horse soldiers and a 
regiment of foot ; and Colonel Pride, standing in the lobby with 
a list of the members who were obnoxious to the army in his hand, 
had them pointed out to him as they came through, and took them 
all into custody. This proceeding was afterwards called by the 
people, for a joke, Pride's Purge. Cromwell was in the North, 
at the head of his men, at the time, but when he came home, 
approved of what had been done. 

What with imprisoning some members and causing others to 
stay away, the army had now reduced the House of Commons to 
some fifty or so. These soon voted that it was treason in a king 
to make war against his parliament and his people, and sent an 
ordinance up to the House of Lords for the King's being tried as a " 
traitor. The House of Lords, then sixteen in number, to a man 
rejected it. Thereupon, the Commons made an ordinance of their 
own, that they were the supreme government of the country, and 
would bring the King to trial. 

The King had been taken for security to a place called Hurst 
Castle : a lonely house on a rock in the sea, connected with the 
coast of Hampshire by a rough road two miles long at low water. 
Thence, he was ordered to be removed to Windsor ; thence, after 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 623 

being but rudely used there, and having none but soldiers to wait 
upon him at table, he was brought up to Saint James's Palace in 
London, and told that his trial was appointed for next day. 

On Saturday, the twentieth of January, one thousand six hundred 
and forty-nine, this memorable trial began. The House of Commons 
had settled that one hundred and thirty-five persons should form 
the Court, and these were taken from the House itself, from among 
the ofl&cers of the army, and from among the lawyers and citizens. 
John Beadshaw, serjeant-at-law, was appointed president. The 
place was Westminster Hall. At the upper end, in a red velvet 
chair, sat the president, with his hat (lined with plates of iron for 
his protection) on his head. The rest of the Court sat on side 
benches, also wearing their hats. The King's seat was covered 
with velvet, like that of the president, and was opposite to it. He 
was brought from Saint James's to Whitehall, and from Whitehall 
he came by water to his trial. 

When he came in, he looked round very steadily on the Court, 
and on the great number of spectators, and then sat down : pres- 
ently he got up and looked round again. On the indictment 
"against Charles Stuart, for high treason," being read, he smiled 
several times, and he denied the authority of the Court, saying that 
there could be no Parliament without a House of Lords, and that 
he saw no House of Lords there. Also, that the King ought to be 
there, and that he saw no King in the King's right place. Brad- 
shaw replied, that the Court was satisfied with its authority, and 
that its authority was God's authority and the kingdom's. He 
then adjourned the Court to the following Monday. On that day, 
the trial was resumed, and went on all the week. When the Satur- 
day came, as the King passed forward to his place in the Hall, some 
soldiers and others cried for "justice ! " and execution on him. 
That day, too, Bradshaw, like an angry Sultan, wore a red robe, 
instead of the black robe he had worn before. The King was 
sentenced to death that day. As he went out, one solitary soldier 
said, " God bless you, Sir ! " For this, his officer struck him. The 
King said he thought the punishment exceeded the offence. The 
silver head of his walking-stick had fallen off while he leaned upon 
it, at one time of the trial. The accident seemed to disturb him, 
as if he thought it ominous of the falling of his own head ; and he 
admitted as much, now it was all over. 

Being taken back to Whitehall, he sent to the House of Commons, 
saying that as the time of his execution might be nigh, he wished 
he might be allowed to see his darling children. It was granted. 
On the Monday he was taken back to Saint James's ; and his two 
children then in England, the Peincess Elizabeth thirteen years 



624 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

old, and the Duke of Gloucester nine years old, were brought to 
take leave of him, from Sion House, near Brentford. It was a sad 
and touching scene, when he kissed and fondled those poor children, 
and made a little present of two diamond seals to the Princess, and 
gave them tender messages to their mother (who little deserved 
them, for she had a lover of her own whom she married soon after- 
wards), and told them that he died " for the laws and liberties of 
the land." I am bound to say that I don't think he did, but I 
dare say he believed so. 

There were ambassadors from Holland that day, to intercede for 
the unhappy King, whom you and I both wish the Parliament had 
spared ; but they got no answer. The Scottish commissioners in- 
terceded too ; so did the Prince of Wales, by a letter in which he 
offered as the next heir to the throne, to accept any conditions 
from the Parliament ; so did the Queen, by letter likewise. Not- 
withstanding all, the warrant for the execution was this day signed. 
There is a story that as Oliver Cromwell went to the table with 
the pen in his hand to put his signature to it, he drew his pen 
across the face of one of the commissioners, who was standing 
near, and marked it with ink. That commissioner had not signed 
his own name yet, and the story adds that when he came to do it 
he marked Cromwell's face with ink in the same way. 

The King slept well, untroubled by the knowledge that it was 
his last night on earth, and rose on the thirtieth of January, two 
hours before day, and dressed himself carefully. He put on two 
shirts lest he should tremble with the cold, and had his hair very 
carefully combed. The warrant had been directed to three officers 
of the army. Colonel Hacker, Colonel Hunks and Colonel 
Phayer. At ten o'clock, the first of these came to the door and 
said it was time to go to Whitehall. The King, who had always 
been a quick walker, walked at his usual speed through the Park, 
and called out to the guard, with his accustomed voice of command, 
" March on apace ! " When he came to Whitehall, he was taken 
to his own bedroom, where a breakfast was set forth. As he had 
taken the Sacrament, he would eat nothing more ; but, at about 
the time when the church bells struck twelve at noon (for he had 
to wait, through the scaffold not being ready), he took the advice 
of the good Bishop Juxon who was with him, and ate a littlg 
bread and drank a glass of claret. Soon after he had taken this 
refreshment, Colonel Hacker came to the chamber with the war- 
rant in his hand, and called for Charles Stuart. 

And then, through the long gallery of Whitehall Palace, which 
he had often seen light and gay and merry and crowded, in very 
different times, the fallen King passed along, until he came to the 




CHARLES I. TAKING LEAVE OF HIS CHILDREN. 



626 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

centre window of the Banqueting House, through which he emerged 
upon the scaffold, w^iich was hung with black. He looked at the 
two executioners, who were dressed in black and masked; he 
looked at the troops of soldiers on horseback and on foot, and all 
looked up at him in silence; he looked at the vast array of specta- 
tors, filling up the view beyond, and turning all their faces upon 
him ; he looked at his old Palace of Saint James's ; and he looked 
at the block. He seemed a little troubled to find that it was so 
low, and asked, " if there were no place higher ? " Then, to those 
upon the scaffold, he said " that it was the Parliament who had 
began the war, and not he ; but he hoped they might be guiltless 
too, as ill instruments had gone between them. In one respect," 
he said, " he suffered justly ; and that was because he had per- 
mitted an unjust sentence to be executed on another." In this he 
referred to the Earl of Strafford. 

He was not at all afraid to die ; but he was anxious to die 
easily. When some one touched the axe while he was speaking, 
he broke off and called out, " Take heed of the axe ! take heed of 
the axe ! " He also said to Colonel Hacker, "Take care that they 
do not put me to pain." He told the executioner, "I shall say 
but very short prayers, and then thrust out my hands " — as the 
sign to strike. 

He put his hair up, under a w^hite satin cap which the bishop 
had carried, and said, " I have a good cause and a gracious God on 
my side." The bishop told him that he had but one stage more 
to travel in this weary world, and that, though it was a turbulent 
and troublesome stage, it was a short one, and w^ould carry him 
a great way — all the way from earth to Heaven. The King's 
last word, as he gave his cloak and the George — the decoration 
from his breast — to the bishop, was, "Remember!" He then 
kneeled down, laid his head on the block, spread out his hands, 
and was instantly killed. One universal groan broke from the 
crowd ; and the soldiers, who had sat on their horses and stood in 
their ranks immovable as statues, were of a sudden all in motion, 
clearing the streets. 

Thus, in the forty-ninth year of his age, falling at the same 
time of his career as Strafford had fallen in his, perished Charles 
the First. With all my sorrow for him, I cannot agree with him 
that he died " the martyr of the people ; " for the people had been 
martyrs to him, and to his ideas of a King's rights, long before. 
Indeed, I am afraid that he was but a bad judge of martyrs ; for 
he had called that infamous Duke of Buckingham " the Martyr 
of his Sovereign." 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 627 

CHAPTER XXXIV. 

ENGLAND UNDER OLIVER CROMWELL. 

Before sunset on the memorable day on which King Charles 
the First was executed, the House of Commons passed an act de- 
claring it treason in any one to proclaim the Prince of Wales — or 
anybody else — King of England. Soon afterwards, it declared 
that the House of Lords was useless and dangerous, and ought to 
be abolished ; and directed that the late King's statue should be 
taken down from the Royal Exchange in the City and other public 
places. Having laid hold of some famous Royalists who had es- 
caped from prison, and having beheaded the Duke of Hamilton, 
Lord Holland, and Lord Capel, in Palace Yard (all of whom 
died very courageously), they then appointed a Council of State to 
govern the country. It consisted of forty-one members, of whom 
five were peers. Bradshaw was made president. The House of 
Commons also readmitted members who had opposed the King's 
death, and made up its numbers to about a hundred and fifty. 

But, it still had an army of more than forty thousand men to 
deal with, and a very hard task it was to manage them. Before 
the King's execution, the army had appointed some of its officers 
to remonstrate between them and the Parliament ; and now the 
common soldiers began to take that office upon themselves. The 
regiments under orders for Ireland mutinied ; one troop of horse 
in the city of London seized their own flag, and refused to obey 
orders. For this, the ringleader was shot : which did not mend 
the matter, for, both his comrades and the people made a public 
funeral for him, and accompanied the body to the grave with sound 
of trumpets and with a gloomy procession of persons carrying bun- 
dles of rosemary steeped in blood. Oliver was the only man to 
deal with such difficulties as these, and he soon cut them short by 
bursting at midnight into the town of Burford, near Salisbury, 
where the mutineers were sheltered, taking four hundred of them 
prisoners, and shooting a number of them by sentence of court- 
martial. The soldiers soon found, as all men did, that Oliver 
was not a man to be trifled with. And there was an end of the 
mutiny. 

The Scottish Parliament did not know Oliver yet ; so, on hear- 
ing of the King's execution, it proclaimed the Prince of Wales 
King Charles the Second, on condition of his respecting the Sol- 
emn League and Covenant. Charles was abroad at that time, and 
so was Montrose, from whose help he had hopes enough to keep 
him holding on and off with commissioners from Scotland, just as 



628 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

his father might have done. Theso hopes were soon at an end ; 
for, Montrose, having raised a few hundred exiles in Germany, and 
landed with them in Scotland, found that the people there, instead 
of joining him, deserted the country at his approach. He was soon 
taken prisoner and carried to Edinburgh. There he was received 
with every possible insult, and carried to prison in a cart, his of- 
ficers going two and two before him. He was sentenced by the 
Parliament to be hanged on a gallows thirty feet high, to have his 
head set on a spike in Edinburgh, and his limbs distributed in 
other places, according to the old barbarous manner. He said he 
had always acted under the Eoyal orders, and only wished he had 
limbs enough to be distributed through Christendom, that it might 
be the more widely known how loyal he had been. He went to 
the scaffold in a bright and brilliant dress, and made a bold end at 
thirty-eight years of age. The breath was scarcely out of his body 
when Charles abandoned his memory, and denied that he had ever 
given him orders to rise in his belialf. the family failing was 
strong in that Charles then ! 

Oliver had been appointed by the Parliament to command the 
army in Ireland, where he took a terrible vengeance for the san- 
guinary rebellion, and made tremendous havoc, particularly in the 
siege of Drogheda, where no quarter was given, and where he found 
at least a thousand of the inhabitants shut up together in the great 
church : every one of whom was killed by his soldiers, usually known 
as Oliver's Ironsides. There were numbers of friars and priests 
among them, and Oliver gruffly wrote home in his despatch that 
these were "knocked on the head" like the rest. 

But, Charles having got over to Scotland where the men of the 
Solemn League and Covenant led him a prodigiously dull life and 
made him very weary with long sermons and grim Sundays, the 
Parliament called the redoubtable Oliver home to knock the Scot- 
tish men on the head for setting up that Prince. Oliver left his 
son-in-law, Ireton, as general in Ireland in his stead (he died there 
afterwards), and he imitated the example of his father-in-law with 
such good will that he brought the country to subjection, and laid 
it at the feet of the Parliament. In the end, they passed an act 
for the settlement of Ireland, generally pardoning all the common 
people, but exempting from this grace such of the wealthier sort 
as had been concerned in the rebellion, or in any killing of Protes- 
tants, or who refused to lay down their arms. Great numbers of 
Irish were got out of the country to serve under Catholic powers 
abroad, and a quantity of land was declared to have been forfeited 
by past offences, and was given to people who had lent money to 
the Parliament early in the war. These were sweeping measures ; 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 629 

but, if Oliver Cromwell had had his own way fully, and had stayed 
in Ireland, he would have done more yet. 

However, as I have said, the Parliament wanted Oliver for Scot- 
land ; so, home Oliver came, and was made Commander of all the 
Forces of the Commonwealth of England, and in three days away 
he went with sixteen thousand soldiers to fight the Scottish men. 
Now, the Scottish men, being then — as you will generally find 
them now — mighty cautious, reflected that the troops they had 
were not used to war like the Ironsides, and would be beaten in 
an open fight. Therefore they said, " If we lie quiet in our trenches 
in Edinburgh here, and if all the farmers come into the town and 
desert the country, the Ironsides wiU be driven out by iron hunger 
and be forced to go away." This was, no doubt, the wisest plan ; 
but as the Scottish clergy would interfere with what they knew 
nothing about, and would perpetually preach long sermons exhort- 
ing the soldiers to come out and fight, the soldiers got it in their 
heads that they absolutely must come out and fight. Accordingly, 
in an evil hour for themselves, they came out of their safe position. 
Oliver fell upon them instantly, and killed three thousand, and 
took ten thousand prisoners. 

To gratify the Scottish Parliament, and preserve their favour, 
Charles had signed a declaration they laid before him, reproaching 
the memory of his father and mother, and representing himself as a 
most religious Prince, to whom the Solemn League and Covenant 
was as dear as life. He meant no sort of truth in this, and soon 
afterwards galloped away on horseback to join some tiresome High- 
land friends, who were always flourishing dirks and broadswords. 
He was overtaken and induced to return ; but this attempt, which 
was called " The Start," did him just so much service, that they did 
not preach quite such long sermons at him afterwards as they had 
done before. 

On the first of January, one thousand six hundred and fifty-one, 
the Scottish people crowned him at Scone. He immediately took 
the chief command of an army of twenty thousand men, and marched 
to Stirling. His hopes were heightened, I dare say, by the redoubt- 
able Oliver being ill of an ague ; but Oliver scrambled out of bed 
in no time, and went to work with such energy that he got behind 
the Royalist army and cut it ofi" from all communication with Scot- 
land. There was nothing for it then, but to go on to England ; 
so it went on as far as Worcester, where the mayor and some of 
the gentry proclaimed King Charles the Second straightway. His 
proclamation, however, was of little use to him, for very few Royal- 
ists appeared ; and, on the very same day, two people were publicly 
beheaded on Tower Hill for espousing his cause. Up came Oliver 



630 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

to Worcester too, at double quick speed, and he and his Ironsides 
so laid about them in the great battle which was fought there, that 
they completely beat the Scottish men, and destroyed the Royalist 
army ; though the Scottish men fought so gallantly that it took five 
hours to do. 

The escape of Charles after this battle of Worcester did him good 
service long afterwards, for it induced many of the generous Eng- 
lish people to take a romantic interest in him, and to think much 
better of him than he ever deserved. He fled in the night, with 
not more than sixty followers, to the house of a Catholic lady in 
Staffordshire. There, for his greater safety, the whole sixty left 
him. He cropped his hair, stained his face and hands brown as if 
they vrere sunburnt, put on the clothes of a labouring countryman, 
and went out in the morning with his axe in his hand, accompanied 
by four wood-cutters who were brothers, and another man who was 
their brother-in-law. These good fellows made a bed for him under 
a tree, as the weather was very bad ; and the wife of one of them 
brought him food to eat ; and the old mother of the four brothers 
came and fell down on her knees before him in the wood, and 
thanked God that her sons were engaged in saving his life. At 
night, he came out of the forest and went on to another house which 
was near the river Severn, with the intention of passing into Wales ; 
but the place swarmed with soldiers, and the bridges were guarded, 
and all the boats were made fast. So, after lying in a hayloft cov- 
ered over with hay, for some time, he came out of his place, attended 
by Colonel Careless, a Catholic gentleman who had met him 
there, and with whom he lay hid, all next day, up in the shady 
branches of a fine old oak. It was lucky for the King that it was 
September -time, and that the leaves had not begun to fall, since he 
and the colonel, perched up in this tree, could catch glimpses of 
the soldiers riding about below, and could hear the crash in the 
wood as they went about beating the boughs. 

After this, he walked and walked until his feet were all blistered ; 
and, having been concealed all one day in a house which was searched 
by the troopers while he was there, went with Lord Wilmot, an- 
other of his good friends, to a place called Bentley, where one Miss 
Lane, a Protestant lady, had obtained a pass to be allowed to ride 
through the guards to see a relation of hers near Bristol. Disguised 
as a servant, he rode in the saddle before this young lady to the house 
of Sir John Winter, while Lord Wilmot rode there boldly, like a 
plain country gentleman, with dogs at his heels. It happened that 
Sir John Winter's butler had been servant in Richmond Palace, and 
knew Charles the moment he set eyes upon him ; but, the butler 
was faithful and kept the secret. As no ship could be found to 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 631 

carry him abroad, it was planned that he should go — still travel- 
ling with Miss Lane as her servant — to another house, at Trent 
near Sherborne in Dorsetshire ; and then Miss Lane and her cousin. 
Me. Lascelles, who had gone on horseback beside her all the 
way, went home. I hope Miss Lane was going to marry that 
cousin, for I am sure she must have been a brave kind girl. If I 
had been that cousin, I should certainly have loved Miss Lane. 

When Charles, lonely for the loss of Miss Lane, was safe at Trent, 
a ship was hired at Lyme, the master of which engaged to take two 
gentlemen to France. In the evening of the same day, the King 
— now riding as servant before another young lady — set off for 
a public-house at a place called Charmouth, where the captain of 
the vessel was to take him on board. But, the captain's wife, being 
afraid of her husband getting into trouble, locked him up and 
would not let him sail. Then they went away to Bridport ; and, 
coming to the inn there, found the stable-yard full of soldiers who 
were on the look-out for Charles, and who talked about him while 
they drank. He had such presence of mind, that he led the horses 
of his party through the yard as any other servant might have 
done, and said, " Come out of the way, you soldiers ; let us have 
room to pass here ! " As he went along, he met a half-tipsy ostler, 
who rubbed his eyes and said to him, "Why, I was formerly ser- 
vant to Mr. Potter at Exeter, and surely I have sometimes seen 
you there, young man ? " He certainly had, for Charles had lodged 
there. His ready answer was, "Ah, I did live with him once ; but 
I have no time to talk now. We'll have a pot of beer together 
when I come back." 

From this dangerous place he returned to Trent, and lay there 
concealed several days. Then he escaped to Heale, near Salisbury ; 
where, in the house of a widow lady, he was hidden five days, until 
the master of a collier lying off Shoreham in Sussex, undertook to 
convey a " gentleman " to France. On the night of the fifteenth 
of October, accompanied by two colonels and a merchant, the King 
rode to Brighton, then a little fishing village, to give the captain of 
the ship a supper before going on board ; but, so many people knew 
him, that this captain knew him too, and not only he, but the land- 
lord and landlady also. Before he went away, the landlord came 
behind his chair, kissed his hand, and said he hoped to live to be a 
lord and to see his wife a lady ; at which Charles laughed. They 
had had a good supper by this time, and plenty of smoking and 
drinking, at which the King was a first-rate hand ; so, the captain 
assured him that he would stand by him, and he did. It was 
agreed that the captain should pretend to sail to Deal, and that 
Charles should address the sailors and say he was a gentleman in 



632 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

debt who was running away from his creditors, and that he hoped 
they would join him in persuading the captain to put him ashore 
in France. As the King acted his part very well indeed, and gave 
the sailors twenty shillings to drink, they begged the captain to do 
what such a worthy gentleman asked. He pretended to yield to 
their entreaties, and the King got safe to Normandy. 

Ireland being now subdued, and Scotland kept quiet by plenty of 
forts and soldiers put there by Oliver, the Parliament would have 
gone on quietly enough, as far as fighting with any foreign enemy 
went, but for getting into trouble with the Dutch, who in the spring 
of the year one thousand six hundred and fifty-one sent a fleet into 
the Downs under their Admiral Van Teomp, to call upon the bold 
English Admiral Blake (who was there with half as many ships 
as the Dutch) to strike his flag. Blake fired a raging broadside in- 
stead, and beat off Van Tromp ; who, in the autumn, came back 
again with seventy ships, and challenged the bold Blake — who 
still was only half as strong — to fight him. Blake fought him all 
day; but, finding that the Dutch were too many for him, got 
quietly off at night. What does Van Tromp upon this, but goes 
cruising and boasting about the Channel, between the North Fore- 
land and the Isle of Wight, with a great Dutch broom tied to his 
masthead, as a sign that he could and would sweep the English off 
the sea ! Within three months, Blake lowered his tone though, and 
his broom too ; for, he and two other bold commanders, Dean and 
Monk, fought him three whole days, took twenty-three of his ships, 
shivered his broom to pieces, and settled his business. 

Things were no sooner quiet again, than the army began to com- 
plain to the Parliament that they were not governing the nation 
properly, and to hint that they thought they could do it better 
themselves. Oliver, who had now made up his mind to be the 
head of the state, or nothing at all, supported them in this, and 
called a meeting of officers and his own Parliamentary friends, at 
his lodgings in Whitehall, to consider the best way of getting rid of 
the Parliament. It had now lasted just as many years as the 
King's unbridled power had lasted, before it came into existence. 
The end of the deliberation was, that Oliver went down to the 
House in his usual plain black dress, with his usual grey worsted 
stockings, but with an unusual party of soldiers behind him. These 
last he left in the lobby, and then went in and sat down. Pres- 
ently he got up, made the Parliament a speech, told them that the 
Lord had done with them, stamped his foot and said, "You are no 
Parliament. Bring them in ! Bring them in ! " At this signal 
the door flew open, and the soldiers appeared. " This is not 
honest," said Sir Harry Vane, one of the members. " Sir Harry 



A CHH^D'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 633 

Vane ! " cried Cromwell ; " 0, Sir Harry Yane ! The Lord deliver 
me from Sir Harry Vane ! " Then he pointed out members one by 
one, and said this man was a drunkard, and that man a dissipated 
fellow, and that man a liar, and so on. Then he caused the 
Speaker to be walked out of his chair, told the guard to clear the 
House, called the mace upon the table — which is a sign that 
the House is sitting — "a fool's bauble," and said, "here, carry it 
away ! " Being obeyed in all these orders, he quietly locked the 
door, put the key in his pocket, walked back to Whitehall again, 
and told his friends, who were stiU assembled there, what he had 
done. 

They formed a new Council of State after this extraordinary 
proceeding, and got a new Parliament together in their own way : 
which Oliver himself opened in a sort of sermon, and which he said 
was the beginning of a perfect heaven upon earth. In this Parlia- 
ment there sat a well-known leather-seller, who had taken the sin- 
gular name of Praise God Barebones, and from whom it was called, 
for a joke, Barebones's Parliament, though its general name was the 
Little Parliament. As it soon appeared that it was not going to 
put Oliver in the first place, it turned out to be not at all like the 
beginning of heaven upon earth, and Oliver said it really was not 
to be borne with. So he cleared ofi" that Parliament in much the 
same way as he had disposed of the other ; and then the council of 
oflBcers decided that he must be made the supreme authority of the 
kingdom, under the title of the Lord Protector of the Common- 
wealth. 

So, on the sixteenth of December, one thousand six hundred and 
fifty-three, a great procession was formed at Oliver's door, and he 
came out in a black velvet suit and a big pair of boots, and got into 
his coach and went down to Westminster, attended by the judges, 
and the lord mayor, and the aldermen, and all the other great and 
wonderful personages of the country. There, in the Court of Chan- 
cery, he publicly accepted the office of Lord Protector. Then he 
was sworn, and the City sword was handed to him, and the seal 
was handed to him, and all the other things were handed to him 
which are usually handed to Kings and Queens on state occasions. 
When Oliver had handed them all back, he was quite made and com- 
pletely finished off as Lord Protector ; and several of the Ironsides 
preached about it at great length, all the evening. 



634 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 



Second Part. 

Oliver Cromwell — whom the people long called Old Noll — in 
accepting the office of Protector, had bound himself by a certain 
paper which was handed to him, called "the Instrument," to sum- 
mon a Parliament, consisting of between four and five hundred 
members, in the election of which neither the Royalists nor the 
Catholics were to have any share. He had also pledged himself 
that this Parliament should not be dissolved without its own con- 
sent until it had sat five months. 

When this Parliament met, Oliver made a speech to them of 
three hours long, very wisely advising them what to do for the 
credit and happiness of the country. To keep down the more 
violent members, he required them to sign a recognition of what 
they were forbidden by " the Instrument" to do; which was, chiefly, 
to take the power from one single person at the head of the state 
or to command the army. Then he dismissed them to go to work. 
With his usual vigour and resolution he went to work himself with 
some frantic preachers — who were rather overdoing their sermons 
in calling him a villain and a tyrant — by shutting up their chapels, 
and sending a few of them off to prison. 

There was not at that time, in England or anywhere else, a 
man so able to govern the country as Oliver Cromwell. Although 
he ruled with a strong hand, and levied a very heavy tax on the 
Royalists (but not until they had plotted against his life), he ruled 
wisely, and as the times required. He caused England to be so re- 
spected abroad, that I wish some lords and gentlemen who have 
governed it under kings and queens in later days would have taken 
a leaf out of Oliver Cromwell's book. He sent bold Admiral Blake 
to the Mediterranean Sea, to make the Duke of Tuscany pay sixty 
thousand pounds for injuries he had done to British subjects, and 
spoliation he had committed on Enghsh merchants. He further 
despatched him and his fleet to Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, to have 
every English ship and every English man delivered up to him that 
had been taken by pirates in those parts. All this was gloriously 
done ; and it began to be thoroughly well known, all over the 
world, that England was governed by a man in earnest, who would 
not allow the English name to be insulted or slighted anywhere. 

These were not all his foreign triumphs. He sent a fleet to sea 
against the Dutch ; and the two powers, each with one hundred 
ships upon its side, met in the English Channel off the North Fore- 
land, where the fight lasted all day long. Dean was killed in this 
fight; but Monk, who commanded in the same ship with him. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 635 

threw his cloak over his body, that the sailors might not know of 
his death, and be disheartened. Nor were they. The English 
broadsides so exceedingly astonished the Dutch that they sheered 
off at last, though the redoubtable Van Tromp fired upon them 
with his own guns for deserting their flag. Soon afterwards, the 
two fleets engaged again, off the coast of Holland. There, the val- 
iant Van Tromp was shot through the heart, and the Dutch gave 
in, and peace was made. 

Further than this, Oliver resolved not to bear the domineering 
and bigoted conduct of Spain, which country not only claimed a 
right to all the gold and silver that could be found in South 
America, and treated the ships of all other countries who visited 
those regions, as pirates, but put English subjects into the horrible 
Spanish prisons of the Inquisition. So, Oliver told the Spanish 
ambassador that English ships must be free to go wherever they 
would, and that English merchants must not be thrown into those 
same dungeons, no, not for the pleasure of all the priests in Spain. 
To this, the Spanish ambassador replied that the gold and silver 
country, and the Holy Inquisition, were his King's two eyes, neither 
of which he could submit to have put out. Very well, said Oliver, 
then he was afraid he (Oliver) must damage those two eyes directly. 

So, another fleet was despatched under two commanders, Penn 
and Venables, for Hispaniola ; where, however, the Spaniards got 
the better of the fight. Consequently, the fleet came home again, 
after taking Jamaica on the way. Oliver, indignant with the two 
commanders who had not done what bold Admiral Blake would 
have done, clapped them both into prison, declared war against 
Spain, and made a treaty with France, in virtue of which it was 
to shelter the King and his brother the Duke of York no longer. 
Then, he sent a fleet abroad under bold Admiral Blake, which 
brought the King of Portugal to his senses — just to keep its hand 
in — and then engaged a Spanish fleet, sunk four great ships, and 
took two more, laden with silver to the value of two millions of 
pounds : which dazzling prize was brought from Portsmouth to 
London in waggons, with the populace of all the towns and villages 
through which the waggons passed, shouting with all their might. 
After this victory, bold Admiral Blake sailed away to the port 
of Santa Cruz to cut off" the Spanish treasure-ships coming from 
Mexico. There, he found them, ten in number, with seven others 
to take care of them, and a big castle, and seven batteries, all roar- 
ing and blazing away at him with great guns. Blake cared no 
more for great guns than for pop-guns — no more for their hot iron 
balls than for snow-balls. He dashed into the harbour, captured 
and burnt every one of the ships, and came sailing out again tri- 



636 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

umphantly, with the victorious English flag flying at his mast- 
head. This was the last triumph of this great commander, who 
had sailed and fought until he was quite worn out. He died, as 
his successful ship was coming into Plymouth Harbor amidst the 
joyful acclamations of the people, and was buried in state in West- 
minster Abbey. Not to lie there, long. 

Over and above all this, Oliver found that the Vaudois, or Prot- 
estant people of the valleys of Lucerne, were insolently treated by 
the Catholic powers, and were even put to death for their relig- 
ion, in an audacious and bloody manner. Instantly, he informed 
those powers that this was a thing which Protestant England would 
not allow ; and he speedily carried his point, through the might of 
his great name, and established their right to worship God in peace 
after their own harmless manner. 

Lastly, his English army won such admiration in fighting with 
the French against the Spaniards, that, after they had assaulted 
the town of Dunkirk together, the French King in person gave it 
up to the English, that it might be a token to them of their might 
and valour. 

There were plots enough against Oliver among the frantic re- 
ligionists (who called themselves Fifth Monarchy Men), and among 
the disappointed Republicans. He had a difficult game to play, 
for the Royalists were always ready to side with either party 
against him. The " King over the water," too, as Charles was 
called, had no scruples about plotting with any one against his 
life; although there is reason to suppose that he would willingly 
have married one of his daughters, if Oliver would have had such 
a son-in-law. There was a certain Colonel Saxby of the army, 
once a great supporter of Oliver's but now turned against him, who 
was a grievous trouble to him through all this part of his career ; 
and who came and went between the discontented in England and 
Spain, and Charles who put himself in alliance with Spain on 
being thrown oflF by France. This man died in prison at last ; 
but not until there had been very serious plots between the Royal- 
ists and Republicans, and an actual rising of them in England,, 
when they burst into the city of Salisbury on a Sunday night, 
seized the judges who were going to hold the assizes there next 
day, and would have hanged them but for the merciful objections 
of the more temperate of their number. Oliver was so vigorous 
and shrewd that he soon put this revolt down, as he did most other 
conspiracies ; and it was well for one of its chief managers — that 
same Lord Wilmot who had assisted in Charles's flight, and was 
now Eael of Rochester — that he made his escape. Oliver 
seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere, and secured such sources- 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 637 

of information as his enemies little dreamed of. There was a 
chosen body of six persons, called the Sealed Knot, who were in 
the closest and most secret confidence of Charles. One of the fore- 
most of these very men, a Sir Richard Willis, reported to Oliver 
everything that passed among them, and had two hundred a year 
for it. 

Miles Syndarcomb, also of the old army, was another con- 
spirator against the Protector. He and a man named Cecil, 
bribed one of his Life Guards to let them have good notice when 
he was going out — intending to shoot him from a window. But, 
owing either to his caution or his good fortune, they could never 
get an aim at him. Disappointed in this design, they got into 
the chapel in Whitehall, with a basketful of combustibles, which 
were to explode by means of a slow match in six hours ; then, in 
the noise and confusion of the fire, they hoped to kill Oliver. But, 
the Life Guardsman himself disclosed this plot; and they were 
seized, and Miles died (or killed himself in prison) a little while 
before he was ordered for execution. A few such plotters Oliver 
caused to be beheaded, a few more to be hanged, and many 
more, including those who rose in arms against him, to be sent as 
slaves to the West Indies. If he were rigid, he was impartial too, 
in asserting the laws of England. When a Portuguese nobleman, 
the brother of the Portuguese ambassador, killed a London citizen 
in mistake for another man with whom he had had a quarrel, 
Oliver caused him to be tried before a jury of Englishmen and 
foreigners, and had him executed in spite of the entreaties of all 
the ambassadors in London. 

One of Oliver's own friends, the Duke of Oldenburgh, in send- 
ing him a present of six fine coach-horses, was very near doing more 
to please the Royalists than all the plotters put together. One 
day, Oliver went with his coach, drawn by these six horses, into 
Hyde Park, to dine with his secretary and some of his other gentle- 
men under the trees there. After dinner, being merry, he took it 
into his head to put his friends inside and to drive them home : 
a postilion riding one of the foremost horses, as the custom was. 
On account of Oliver's being too free with the whip, the six fine 
horses went off" at a galop, the postilion got thrown, and Oliver 
fell upon the coach-pole and narrowly escaped being shot by his 
own pistol, which got entangled with his clothes in the harness, 
and went off. He was dragged some distance by the foot, until 
his foot came out of the shoe, and then he came safely to the 
ground under the broad body of the coach, and was very little the 
worse. The gentlemen inside were only bruised, and the discon- 
tented people of aU parties were much disappointed. 



638 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

The rest of the history of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell 
is a history of his Parliaments. His first one not pleasing him at 
all, he waited until the five months were out, and then dissolved 
it. The next was better suited to his views ; and from that he 
desired to get — if he could with safety to himself — the title of 
King. He had had this in his mind some time : whether because 
he thought that the English people, being more used to the title, 
were more likely to obey it ; or whether because he really wished 
to be a king himself, and to leave the succession to that title in 
his family, is far from clear. He was already as high, in England 
and in all the world, as he would ever be, and I doubt if he cared 
for the mere name. However, a paper, called the " Humble Peti- 
tion and Advice," was presented to him by the House of Commons, 
praying him to take a high title and to appoint his successor. 
That he would have taken the title of King there is no doubt, but 
for the strong opposition of the army. This induced him to for- 
bear, and to assent only to the other points of the petition. Upon 
which occasion there was another grand show in Westminster 
Hall, when the Speaker of the House of Commons formally in- 
vested him with a purple robe lined with ermine, and presented 
him with a splendidly bound Bible, and put a golden sceptre in his 
hand. The next time the Parliament met, he called a House of 
Lords of sixty members, as the petition gave him power to do ; 
but as that Parliament did not please him either, and would not 
proceed to the business of the country, he jumped into a coach one 
morning, took six Guards with him, and sent them to the right- 
about. I wish this had been a warning to Parliaments to avoid 
long speeches, and do more work. 

It was the month of August, one thousand six hundred and fifty- 
eight, when Oliver Cromwell's favourite daughter, Elizabeth 
Claypole (who had lately lost her youngest son), lay very ill, 
and his mind was greatly troubled, because he loved her dearly. 
Another of his daughters was married to Lord Falconberg, 
another to the grandson of the Earl of Warwick, and he had made 
his son Richard one of the Members of the Upper House. He 
was very kind and loving to them all, being a good father and a 
good husband, but he loved this daughter the best of the family, 
and went down to Hampton Court to see her, and could hardly be 
induced to stir from her sick room until she died. Although his 
religion had been of a gloomy kind, his disposition had been always 
cheerful. He had been fond of music in his home, and had kept 
open table once a week for all officers of the army not below the 
rank of captain, and had always preserved in his house a quiet 
sensible dignity. He encouraged men of genius and learning, and 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 639 

loved to have them about him. Milton was one of his great 
friends. He was good humoured too, with the nobility, whose 
dresses and manners were very different from his ; and to show 
them what good information he had, he would sometimes jokingly 
tell them when they were his guests, where they had last drunk 
the health of the " King over the water," and would recommend 
them to be more private (if they could) another time. But he 
had lived in busy times, had borne the weight of heavy State 
affairs, and had often gone in fear of his life. He was ill of the 
gout and ague ; and when the death of his beloved child came 
upon him in addition, he sank, never to raise his head again. He 
told his physicians on the twenty-fourth of August that the Lord 
had assured him that he was not to die in that illness, and that he 
would certainly get better. This was only his sick fancy, for on 
the third of September, which was the anniversary of the great 
battle of Worcester, and the day of the year which he called his 
fortunate day, he died, in the sixtieth year of his age. He had 
been delirious, and had lain insensible some hours, but he had 
been overheard to murmur a very good prayer the day before. 
The whole country lamented his death. If you want to know the 
real worth of Oliver Cromwell, and his real services to his country, 
you can hardly do better than compare England under him, with 
England under Chakles the Second. 

He had appointed his son Richard to succeed him, and after there 
had been, at Somerset House in the Strand, a lying in state more 
splendid than sensible — as all such vanities after death are, I think 
— Richard became Lord Protector. He was an amiable country 
gentleman, but had none of his father's great genius, and was quite 
unfit for such a post in such a storm of parties. Richard's Protec- 
torate, which only lasted a year and a half, is a history of quarrels 
between the officers of the army and the Parliament, and between 
the officers among themselves; and of a growing discontent among 
the people, who had far too many long sermons and far too few 
amusements, and wanted a change. At last, General Monk got 
the army well into his own hands, and then in pursuance of a 
secret plan he seems to have entertained from the time of Oliver's 
death, declared for the King's cause. He did not do this openly ; 
but, in his place in the House of Commons, as one of the members 
for Devonshire, strongly advocated the proposals of one Sir John 
Greenville, who came to the House with a letter from Charles, 
dated from Breda, and with whom he had previously been in secret 
communication. There had been plots and counterplots, and a re- 
call of the last members of the Long Parliament, and an end of 
the Long Parliament, and risings of the Royalists that were made 



640 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

too soon ; and most men being tired out, and there being no one to 
head the country now great Oliver was dead, it was readily agreed 
to welcome Charles Stuart. Some of the wiser and better members 
said — what was most true — that in the letter from Breda, he 
gave no real promise to govern well, and that it would be best to 
make him pledge himself beforehand as to what he should be bound 
to do for the benefit of the kingdom. Monk said, however, it would 
be all right when he came, and he could not come too soon. 

So, everybody found out all in a moment that the country must 
be prosperous and happy, having another Stuart to condescend to 
reign over it ; and there was a prodigious firing off of guns, light- 
ing of bonfires, ringing of bells, and throwing up of caps. The 
people drank the King's health by thousands in the open streets, 
and everybody rejoiced. Down came the Arms of the Common- 
wealth, up went the Royal Arms instead, and out came the public 
money. Fifty thousand pounds for the King, ten thousand pounds 
for his brother the Duke of York, five thousand pounds for his 
brother the Duke of Gloucester. Prayers for these gracious Stuarts 
were put up in all the churches ; commissioners were sent to Holland 
(which suddenly found out that Charles was a great man, and that 
it loved him) to invite the King home; Monk and the Kentish 
grandees went to Dover, to kneel down before him as he landed. 
He kissed and embraced Monk, made him ride in the coach with 
himself and his brothers, came on to London amid wonderful shout- 
ings, and passed through the army at Blackheath on the twenty-ninth 
of May (his birthday), in the year one thousand six hundred and 
sixty. Greeted by splendid dinners under tents, by flags and tap- 
estry streaming from all the houses, by delighted crowds in all the 
streets, by troops of noblemen and gentlemen in rich dresses, by 
City companies, train-bands, drummers, trumpeters, the great Lord 
Mayor, and the majestic Aldermen, the King went on to Whitehall. 
On entering it, he commemorated his Restoration with the joke that 
it really would seem to have been his own fault that he had not 
come long ago, since everybody told him that he had always wished 
for him with all his heart. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 641 



CHAPTER XXXV. 

ENGLAND UNDER CHARLES THE SECOND, CALLED THE MERRY 
MONARCH. 

There never were such profligate times in England as under 
Charles the Second. Whenever you see his portrait, with his 
swarthy ill-looking face and great nose, you may fancy him in his 
Court at Whitehall, surrounded by some of the very worst vaga- 
bonds in the kingdom (though they were lords and ladies), drink- 
ing, gambling, indulging in vicious conversation, and committing 
every kind of profligate excess. It has been a fashion to call 
Charles the Second " The Merry Monarch." Let me try to give 
you a general idea of some of the merry things that were done, in 
the merry days when this merry gentleman sat upon his merry 
throne, in merry England. 

The first merry proceeding was — of course — to declare that 
he was one of the greatest, the wisest, and the noblest kings that 
ever shone, like the blessed sun itself, on this benighted earth. 
The next merry and pleasant piece of business was, for the Parlia- 
ment, in the humblest manner, to give him one million two hun- 
dred thousand pounds a year, and to settle upon him for life that 
old disputed tonnage and poundage which had been so bravely 
fought for. Then, General Monk, being made Earl of Albe- 
marle, and a few other Royalists similarly rewarded, the law went 
to work to see what was to be done to those persons (they were 
called Regicides) who had been concerned in making a martyr of 
the late King. Ten of these were merrily executed ; that is to 
say, six of the judges, one of the council. Colonel Hacker and 
another ofl&cer who had commanded the Guards, and Hugh Peters, 
a preacher who had preached against the martyr with all his heart. 
These executions were so extremely merry, that every horrible 
circumstance which Cromwell had abandoned was revived with 
appalling cruelty. The hearts of the sufierers were torn out of 
their living bodies ; their bowels were burned before their faces ; 
the executioner cut jokes to the next victim, as he rubbed his filthy 
hands together, that were reeking with the blood of the last ; and 
the heads of the dead were drawn on sledges with the living to the 
place of suffering. Still, even so merry a monarch could not force 
one of these dying men to say that he was sorry for what he had 
done. Nay, the most memorable thing said among them was, that 
if the thing were to do again they would do it. 

Sir Harry Vane, who had furnished the evidence against Straf- 
ford, and was one of the most staunch of the Republicans, was 
2t 



642 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

also tried, found guilty, and ordered for execution. When he 
came upon the scaffold on Tower Hill, after conducting his own 
defence with great power, his notes of what he had meant to say to 
the people were torn away from him, and the drums and trumpets 
were ordered to sound lustily and drown his voice; for, the people 
had been so much impressed by what the Eegicides had calmly 
said with their last breath, that it was the custom now, to have 
the drums and trumpets always under the scaffold, ready to strike 
up. Vane said no more than this : " It is a bad cause which 
cannot bear the words of a dying man : " and bravely died. 

These merry scenes were succeeded by another, perhaps even 
merrier. On the anniversary of the late King's death, the bodies 
of Oliver Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were torn out of their 
graves in Westminster Abbey, dragged to Tyburn, hanged there on 
a gallows all day long, and then beheaded. Imagine the head of 
Oliver Cromwell set upon a pole to be stared at by a brutal crowd, 
not one of whom would have dared to look the living Oliver in the 
face for half a moment ! Think, after you have read this reign, 
what England was under Oliver Cromwell who was torn out of his 
grave, and what it was under this merry monarch who sold it, like 
a merry Judas, over and over again. 

Of course, the remains of Oliver's wife and daughter were not 
to be spared either, though they had been most excellent women. 
The base clergy of that time gave up their bodies, w^hich had been 
buried in the Abbey, and — to the eternal disgrace of England — 
they were thrown into a pit, together with the mouldering bones 
of Pym and of the brave and bold old Admiral Blake. 

The clergy acted this disgraceful part because they hoped to 
get the nonconformists, or dissenters, thoroughly put down in this 
reign, and to have but one prayer-book and one service for all 
kinds of people, no matter what their private opinions were. This 
was pretty well, I think, for a Protestant Church, which had dis- 
placed the Romish Church because people had a right to their own 
opinions in religious matters, However, they carried it with a 
high hand, and a prayer-book was agreed upon, in which the 
extremest opinions of Archbishop Laud were not forgotten. An 
Act was passed, too, preventing any dissenter from holding any 
office under any corporation. So, the regular clergy in their 
triumph were soon as merry as the King. The army being by 
this time disbanded, and the King crowned, everything was to go 
on easily for evermore. 

I must say a word here about the King's family. He had not 
been long upon the throne when his brother the Duke of Gloucester, 
and his sister the Princess of Orange, died within a few months 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 643 

of each other, of small-pox. His remaining sister, the Princess 
Heneietta, married the Duke of Orleans, the brother of Louis 
THE Fourteenth, King of France. His brother James, Duke 
OF York, was made High Admiral, and by-and-bye became a Catho- 
lic. He was a gloomy siiUen bilious sort of man, with a remark- 
able partiality for the ugliest women in the country. He married, 
under very discreditable circumstances, Anne Hyde, the daughter 
of Lord Clarendon, then the King's principal minister — not at 
all a delicate minister either, but doing much of the dirty work 
of a very dirty palace. It became important now that the King 
himself should be married ; and divers foreign Monarchs, not very 
particular about the character of their son-in-law, proposed their 
daughters to him. The King of Portugal offered his daughter, 
Catherine of Braganza, and fifty thousand pounds : in addition 
to which, the French King, who was favourable to that match, 
ofi"ered a loan of another fifty thousand. The King of Spain, on 
the other hand, offered any one out of a dozen of Princesses, and 
other hopes of gain. But the ready money carried the day, and 
Catherine came over in state to her merry marriage. 

The whole Court was a great flaunting crowd of debauched men 
and shameless women ; and Catherine's merry husband insulted and 
outraged her in every possible way, until she consented to receive 
those worthless creatures as her very good friends, and to degrade 
herself by their companionship. A Mrs. Palmer, whom the King 
made Lady Castlemaine, and afterwards Duchess of Cleve- 
land, was one of the most powerful of the bad women about the 
Court, and had great influence with the King nearly all through 
his reign. Another merry lady named Moll Davies, a dancer at 
the theatre, was afterwards her rival. So was Nell Gwyn, first 
an orange girl and then an actress, who really had good in her, and 
of whom one of the worst things I know is, that actually she does 
seem to have been fond of the King. The first Duke of St. 
Albans was this orange girl's child. In like manner the son of 
a merry waiting-lady, whom the King created Duchess of Ports- 
mouth, became the Duke of Richmond. Upon the whole it is 
not so bad a thing to be a commoner. 

The Merry Monarch was so exceedingly merry among these merry 
ladies, and some equally merry (and equally infamous) lords and 
gentlemen, that he soon got through his hundred thousand pounds, 
and then, by way of raising a little pocket-money, made a merry 
bargain. He sold Dunkirk to the French King for five millions of 
livres. When I think of the dignity to which Oliver Cromwell 
raised England in the eyes of foreign powers, and when I think of 
the manner in which he gained for England this very Dunkirk, I 



644 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

am much inclined to consider that if the Merry Monarch had been 
made to follow his father for this action, he would have received 
his just deserts. 

Though he was like his father in none of that father's greater 
qualities, he was like him in being worthy of no trust. When he 
sent that letter to the Parliament, from Breda, he did expressly 
promise that all sincere religious opinions should be respected. Yet 
he was no sooner firm in his power than he consented to one of 
the worst Acts of Parliament ever passed. Under this law, every 
minister who should not give his solemn assent to the Prayer-Book 
by a certain day, was declared to be a minister no longer, and to be 
deprived of his church. The consequence of this was that some 
two thousand honest men were taken from their congregations, and 
reduced to dire poverty and distress. It was followed by another 
outrageous law, called the Conventicle Act, by which any person 
above the age of sixteen who was present at any religious service 
not according to the Prayer-Book, was to be imprisoned three months 
for the first offence, six for the second, and to be transported for 
the third. This Act alone filled the prisons, which were then most 
dreadful dungeons, to overflowing. 

The Covenanters in Scotland had already fared no better. A 
base Parliament, usually known as the Drunken Parliament, in 
consequence of its principal members being seldom sober, had been 
got together to make laws against the Covenanters, and to force 
all men to be of one mind in religious matters. The Marquis of 
Argyle, relying on the King's honour, had given himself up to 
him; but, he was wealthy, and his enemies wanted his wealth. 
He was tried for treason, on the evidence of some private letters 
in which he had expressed opinions — as well he might — more 
favourable to the government of the late Lord Protector than of 
the present merry and religious King. He was executed, as were 
two men of mark among the Covenanters ; and Sharp, a traitor 
who had once been the friend of the Presbyterians and betrayed 
them, was made Archbishop of Saint Andrew's, to teach the Scotch 
how to like bishops. 

Things being in this merry state at home, the Merry Monarch 
undertook a war with the Dutch ; principally because they inter- 
fered with an African company, established with the two objects 
of buying gold-dust and slaves, of which the Duke of York was 
a leading member. After some preliminary hostilities, the said 
duke sailed to the coast of Holland with a fleet of ninety-eight 
vessels of war, and four fire-ships. This engaged with the Dutch 
fleet, of no fewer than one hundred and thirteen ships. In the 
great battle between the two forces, the Dutch lost eighteen ships, 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 645 

four admirals, and seven thousand men. But, the English on shore 
were in no mood of exultation when they heard the news. 

For, this was the year and the time of the Great Plague in 
London. During the winter of one thousand six hundred and 
sixty-four it had been whispered about, that some few people had 
died here and there of the disease called the Plague, in some of 
the unwholesome suburbs around London. News was not pub- 
lished at that time as it is now, and some people believed these 
nimours, and some disbelieved them, and they Avere soon forgotten. 
But, in the month of May, one thousand six hundred and sixty-five, 
it began to be said all over the town that the disease had burst out 
with great violence in Saint Giles's, and that the people were dying 
in great numbers. This soon turned out to be awfully true. The 
roads out of London were choked up by people endeavouring to 
escape from the infected city, and large sums were paid for any 
kind of conveyance. The disease soon spread so fast, that it was 
necessary to shut up the houses in which sick people were, and to 
cut them oflf from communication with the living. Every one of 
these houses was marked on the outside of the door with a red 
cross, and the words. Lord, have mercy upon us ! The streets 
were all deserted, grass grew in the public ways, and there was 
a dreadful silence in the air. When night came on, dismal rum- 
blings used to be heard, and these were the wheels of the death- 
carts, attended by men with veiled faces and holding cloths to 
their mouths, who rang doleful bells and cried in a loud and sol- 
emn voice, " Bring out your dead ! " The corpses put into these 
carts were buried by torchlight in great pits ; no service being per- 
formed over them ; all men being afraid to stay for a moment on 
the brink of the ghastly graves. In the general fear, children ran 
away from their parents, and parents from their children. Some 
who were taken ill, died alone, and without any help. Some were 
stabbed or strangled by hired nurses who robbed them of all their 
money, and stole the very beds on which they lay. Some went 
mad, dropped from the windows, ran through the streets, and in 
their pain and frenzy flung tliemselves into the river. 

These were not all the horrors of the time. The wicked and dis- 
solute, in wild desperation, sat in the taverns singing roaring songs, 
and were stricken as they drank, and went out and died. The fear- 
ful and superstitious persuaded themselves that they saw super- 
natural sights — burning swords in the sky, gigantic arms and darts. 
Others pretended that at nights vast crowds of ghosts walked round 
and round the dismal pits. One madman, naked, and carrying a bra- 
zier full of burning coals upon his head, stalked through the streets, 
crying out that he was a Prophet, commissioned to denounce the 



646 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

vengeance of the Lord on wicked London. Another always went 
to and fro, exclaiming, " Yet forty days, and London shall be de- 
stroyed ! " A third awoke the echoes in the dismal streets, by 
night and by day, and made the blood of the sick run cold, by call- 
ing out incessantly, in a deep hoarse voice, " 0, the great and dread- 
ful God!" 

Through the months of July and August and September, the 
Great Plague raged more and more. Great fires were lighted in 
the streets, in the hope of stopping the infection ; but there was a 
plague of rain too, and it beat the fires out. At last, the winds 
which usually arise at that time of the year which is called the 
equinox, when day and night are of equal length all over the world, 
began to blow, and to purify the wretched town. The deaths began 
to decrease, the red crosses slowly to disappear, the fugitives to re- 
turn, the shops to open, pale frightened faces to be seen in the 
streets. The Plague had been in every part of England, but in 
close and unwholesome London it had killed one hundred thousand 
people. 

All this time, the Merry Monarch was as merry as ever, and as 
worthless as ever. All this time, the debauched lords and gentle- 
men and the shameless ladies danced and gamed and drank, and 
loved and hated one another, according to their merry ways. So 
little humanity did the government learn from the late affliction, 
that one of the first things the Parliament did when it met at Ox- 
ford (being as yet afraid to come to London), was to make a law, 
called the Five Mile Act, expressly directed against those poor 
ministers who, in time of the Plague, had manfully come back to 
comfort the unhappy people. This infamous law, by forbidding 
them to teach in any school, or to come within five miles of any 
city, town, or village, doomed them to starvation and death. 

The fleet had been at sea, and healthy. The King of France 
was now in alliance with the Dutch, though his navy was chiefly 
employed in looking on while the English and Dutch fought. The 
Dutch gained one victory : and the English gained another and a 
greater ; and Prince Kupert, one of the Enghsh admirals, was out 
in the Channel one windy night, looking for the French Admiral, 
with the intention of giving him something more to do than he had « 
had yet, when the gale increased to a storm, and blew him into I 
Saint Helen's. That night was the third of September, one thou- ■ 
sand six hundred and sixty-six, and that wind fanned the Great 
Fire of London. 

It broke out at a baker's shop near London Bridge, on the spot 
on which the Monument now stands as a remembrance of those 
raging flames. It spread and spread, and burned and burned, for 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. C47 

three days. The nights were lighter than the days ; in the day- 
time there was an immense cloud of smoke, and in the night-time 
there was a great tower of fire mounting up into the sky, which 
lighted the whole country landscape for ten miles round. Showers 
of hot ashes rose into the air and fell on distant places ; flying 
sparks carried the conflagration to great distances, and kindled it in 
twenty new spots at a time ; church steeples fell down with tre- 
mendous crashes ; houses crumbled into cinders by the hundred and 
the thousand. The summer had been intensely hot and dry, the 
streets were very narrow, and the houses mostly built of wood and 
plaster. Nothing could stop the tremendous fire, but the want of 
more houses to burn ; nor did it stop until the whole way from the 
Tower to Temple Bar was a desert, composed of the ashes of thir- 
teen thousand houses and eighty-nine churches. 

This was a terrible visitation at the time, and occasioned great 
loss and suffering to the two hundred thousand burnt-out people, 
who were obliged to lie in the fields under the open night sky, or 
in hastily-made huts of mud and straw, while the lanes and roads 
were rendered impassable by carts which had broken down as they 
tried to save their goods. But the Fire was a great blessing to the 
City afterwards, for it arose from its ruins very much improved — 
built more regularly, more widely, more cleanly and carefully, and 
therefore much more healthily. It might be far more healthy than 
it is, but there are some people in it still — even now, at this time, 
nearly two hundred years later — so selfish, so pig-headed, and so 
ignorant, that I doubt if even another Great Fire would warm them 
up to do their duty. 

The Catholics were accused of having wilfully set London in 
flames ; one poor Frenchman, who had been mad for years, even ac- 
cused himself of having with his own hand fired the first house. 
There is no reasonable doubt, however, that the fire was accidental. 
An inscription on the Monument long attributed it to the Catholics ; 
but it is removed now, and was always a malicious and stupid 
untruth. 

Second Paet. 

That the Merry Monarch might be very merry indeed, in the 
merry times when his people were suffering under pestilence and 
fire, he drank and gambled and flung away among his favourites 
the money which the Parliament had voted for the war. The con- 
sequence of this was that the stout-hearted English sailors were 
merrily starving of want, and dying in the streets ; while the Dutch, 
under their admirals De Witt and De Ruyter, came into the 
river Thames, and up the river Medway as far as Upnor, burned 



648 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

the guard-ships, silenced the weak batteries, and did what they would 
to the English coast for six whole weeks. Most of the English ships 
that could have prevented them had neither powder nor shot on 
board ; in this merry reign, public officers made themselves as merry 
as the King did with the public money ; and when it was entrusted 
to them to spend in national defences or preparations, they put it 
into their own pockets with the merriest grace in the world. 

Lord Clarendon had, by this time, run as long a course as is 
usually allotted to the unscrupulous ministers of bad kings. He 
was impeached by his political opponents, but unsuccessfully. The 
King then commanded him to withdraw from England and retire 
to France, which he did, after defending himself in writing. He 
was no great loss at home, and died abroad some seven years after- 
wards. 

There then came into power a ministry called the Cabal Ministry, 
because it was composed of Lord Clifford, the Earl of Arling- 
ton, the Duke of Buckingham (a great rascal, and the King's 
most powerful favourite), Lord Ashley, and the Duke of Lau- 
derdale, c. A. B. A. L. As the French were making conquests in 
Flanders, the first Cabal proceeding was to make a treaty with the 
Dutch, for uniting with Spain to oppose the French. It was no 
sooner made than the Merry Monarch, who always wanted to get 
money without being accountable to a Parliament for his expendi- 
ture, apologised to the King of France for having had anything to 
do with it, and concluded a secret treaty with him, making himself 
his infamous pensioner to the amount of two millions of livres down, 
and three millions more a year ; and engaging to desert that very 
Spain, to make war against those very Dutch, and to declare him- 
self a Cathohc when a convenient time should arrive. This relig- 
ious King had lately been crying to his Catholic brother on the 
subject of his strong desire to be a Catholic; and now he merrily 
concluded this treasonable conspiracy against the country he gov- 
erned, by undertaking to become one as soon as he safely could. 
For all of which, though he had had ten merry heads instead of 
one, he richly deserved to lose them by the headsman's axe. 

As his one merry head might have been far from safe, if these 
things had been known, they were kept very quiet, and war was 
declared by France and England against the Dutch. But, a very 
uncommon man, afterwards most important to English history and 
to the religion and liberty of this land, arose among them, and for 
many long years defeated the whole projects of France. This was 
William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, son of the last Prince 
of Orange of the same name, who married the daughter of Charles 
the First of England. He was a young man at this time, only just 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 649 

of age ; but he was brave, cool, intrepid, and wise. His father had 
been so detested that, upon his death, the Dutch had abolished the 
authority to which this son would have otherwise succeeded (Stadt- 
holder it was called), and placed the chief power in the hands of 
John de Witt, who educated this young prince. Now, the Prince 
became very popular, and John de Witt's brother Cornelius was 
sentenced to banishment on a false accusation of conspiring to kill 
him. John went to the prison where he was, to take him away to 
exile, in his coach ; and a great mob who collected on the occasion, 
then and there cruelly murdered both the brothers. This left the 
government in the hands of the Prince, who was really the choice 
of the nation ; and from this time he exercised it with the greatest 
vigour, against the whole power of France, under its famous gen- 
erals CoNDE and Tueenne, and in support of the Protestant relig- 
ion. It was full seven years before this war ended in a treaty of 
peace made at Nimeguen, and its details would occupy a very con- 
siderable space. It is enough to say that William of Orange estab- 
lished a famous character with the whole world ; and that the 
Merry Monarch, adding to and improving on his former baseness, 
bound himself to do everything the King of France liked, and 
nothing the King of France did not like, for a pension of one hun- 
dred thousand pounds a year, which was afterwards doubled. Be- 
sides this, the King of France, by means of his corrupt ambassador 
— who wrote accounts of his proceedings in England, which are 
not always to be believed, I think — bought our English members 
of Parliament, as he wanted them. So, in point of fact, during a 
considerable portion of this merry reign, the King of France was 
the real King of this country. 

But there was a better time to come, and it was to come (though 
his royal uncle little thought so) through that very William, Prince 
of Orange. He came over to England, saw Mary, the elder daugh- 
ter of the Duke of York, and married her. We shall see by-and-bye 
what came of that marriage, and why it is never to be forgotten. 

This daughter was a Protestant, but her mother died a Catholic. 
She and her sister Anne, also a Protestant, were the only surviv- 
ors of eight children. Anne afterwards married George, Prince 
OF Denmark, brother to the King of that country. 

Lest you should do the Merry Monarch the injustice of suppos- 
ing that he was even good humoured (except when he had every- 
thing his own way), or that he was high spirited and honourable, 
I will mention here what was done to a member of the House of 
Commons, Sir John Coventry. He made a remark in a debate 
about taxing the theatres, which gave the King offence. The King 
agreed with his illegitimate son, who had been born abroad, and 



650 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

whom he had made Duke of Monmouth, to take the following 
merry vengeance. To waylay him at night, fifteen armed men to one, 
and to slit his nose with a penknife. Like master, like man. The 
King's favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, w^as strongly suspected 
of setting on an assassin to murder the Duke of Oemond as he 
was returning home from a dinner ; and that duke's spirited son, 
Lord Ossory, was so persuaded of his guilt, that he said to him at 
Court, even as he stood beside the King, "My lord, I know very 
well that you are at the bottom of this late attempt upon my father. 
But I give you warning, if he ever come to a violent end, his blood 
shall be upon you, and wherever I meet you I will pistol you ! I 
will do so, though I find you standing behind the King's chair ; and 
I tell you this in his Majesty's presence, that you may be quite sure 
of my doing what I threaten." Those were merry times indeed. 

There was a fellow named Blood, who was seized for making, 
wath two companions, an audacious attempt to steal the crown, the 
globe, and sceptre, from the place where the jewels were kept in 
the Tower. This robber, w^ho was a swaggering rufiian, being 
taken, declared that he was the man who had endeavoured to kill 
the Duke of Ormond, and that he had meant to kill the King too, 
but was overawed by the majesty of his appearance, when he might 
otherwise have done it, as he was bathing at Battersea. The King 
being but an ill-looking fellow, I don't believe a word of this. 
Whether he was flattered, or whether he knew that Buckingham 
had really set Blood on to murder the duke, is uncertain. But it 
is quite certain that he pardoned this thief, gave him an estate of 
five hundred a year in Ireland (which had had the honour of giving 
him birth), and presented him at Court to the debauched lords and 
the shameless ladies, who made a great deal of him — as I have no 
doubt they would have made of the devil himself, if the King had 
introduced him. 

Infamously pensioned as he was, the King still wanted money, and 
consequently was obliged to call Parliaments. In these, the great 
object of the Protestants was to thwart the Catholic Duke of 
York, who married a second time; his new wife being a young 
lady only fifteen years old, the Catholic sister of the Duke of 
MoDENA. In this they were seconded by the Protestant dissent- 
ers, though to their own disadvantage : since, to exclude Catholics 
from power, they were even willing to exclude themselves. The . 
King's object was to pretend to be a Protestant, while he was ■ 
really a Catholic; to swear to the bishops that he was devoutly I' 
attached to the English Church, while he knew he had bargained 
it away to the King of France; and by cheating and deceiving 
them, and all who were attached to royalty, to become despotic 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 651 

and be powerful enough to confess what a rascal he was. Mean- 
time, the King of France, knowing his merry pensioner well, in- 
trigued with the King's opponents in Parliament, as well as with 
the King and his friends. 

The fears that the country had of the Catholic religion being 
restored, if the Duke of York should come to the throne, and the 
low cunning of the King in pretending to share their alarms, led 
to some very terrible results. A certain Dr. Tonge, a dull clergy- 
man in the City, fell into the hands of a certain Titus Gates, a 
most infamous character, who pretended to have acquired among 
the Jesuits abroad a knowledge of a great plot for the murder of 
the King, and the re-establishment of the Catholic religion. Titus 
Gates, being produced by this unlucky Dr. Tonge and solemnly 
examined before the Council, contradicted himself in a thousand 
ways, told the most ridiculous and improbable stories, and impli- 
cated Coleman, the Secretary of the Duchess of York. Now, 
although what he charged against Coleman was not true, and 
although you and I know very well that the real dangerous Cath- 
olic plot was that one with the King of France of which the Merry 
Monarch was himself the head, there happened to be found among 
Coleman's papers, some letters, in which he did praise the days of 
Bloody Queen Mary, and abuse the Protestant religion. This was 
great good fortune for Titus, as it seemed to confirm him ; but 
better still was in store. Sir Edmundbury Godfrey, the magis- 
trate who had first examined him, being unexpectedly found dead 
near Primrose Hill, was confidently believed to have been killed 
by the Catholics. I think there is no doubt that he had been 
melancholy mad, and that he killed himself; but he had a great 
Protestant funeral, and Titus was called the Saver of the Nation, 
and received a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year. 

As soon as Gates's wickedness had met with this success, up 
started another villain, named William Bedloe, who, attracted by 
a reward of five hundred pounds offered for the apprehension of 
the murderers of Godfrey, came forward and charged two Jesuits 
and some other persons with having committed it at the Queen's 
desire. Gates, going into partnership with this new informer, had 
the audacity to accuse the poor Queen herself of high treason. Then 
appeared a third informer, as bad as either of the two, and accused 
a Catholic banker named Stayley of having said that the King 
was the greatest rogue in the world (which would not have been 
far from the truth), and that he would kill him with his own hand. 
This banker, being at once tried and executed, Coleman and two 
others were tried and executed. Then, a miserable wretch named 
Prance, a Catholic silversmith, being accused by Bedloe, was tort- 



652 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ured into confessing that he had taken part in Godfrey's murder, 
and into accusing three other men of having committed it. Then, 
five Jesuits were accused by Gates, Bedloe, and Prance together, 
and were all found guilty, and executed on the same kind of con- 
tradictory and absurd evidence. The Queen's physician and three 
monks were next put on their trial ; but Gates and Bedloe had for 
the time gone far enough, and these four were acquitted. The 
public mind, however, was so full of a Catholic plot, and so strong 
against the Duke of York, that James consented to obey a written 
order from his brother, and to go with his family to Brussels, pro- 
vided that his rights should never be sacrificed in his absence to 
the Duke of Monmouth. The House of Commons, not satisfied 
with this as the King hoped, passed a bill to exclude the duke 
frorn ever succeeding to the throne. In return, the King dissolved 
the Parliament. He had deserted his old favourite, the Duke of 
Buckingham, who was now in the opposition. 

To give any sufficient idea of the miseries of Scotland in this 
merry reign, would occupy a hundred pages. Because the people 
would not have bishops, and were resolved to stand by their solemn 
League and Covenant, such cruelties were inflicted upon them as 
make the blood run cold. Ferocious dragoons galloped through the 
country to punish the peasants for deserting the churches ; sons 
were hanged up at their fathers' doors for refusing to disclose where 
their fathers were concealed ; wives were tortured to death for not 
betraying their husbands; people were taken out of their fields 
and gardens, and shot on the public roads without trial ; lighted 
matches were tied to the fingers of prisoners, and a most horrible 
torment called the Boot was invented, and constantly applied, which 
ground and mashed the victims' legs with iron wedges. Witnesses 
were tortured as well as prisoners. All the prisons were full ; all 
the gibbets were heavy with bodies ; murder and plunder devas- 
tated the whole country. In spite of all, the Covenanters were by 
no means to be dragged into the churches, and persisted in worship- 
ping God as they thought right. A body of ferocious Highlanders, 
turned upon them from the mountains of their own country, had 
no greater eff'ect than the English dragoons under Grahame of 
Claverhouse, the most cruel and rapacious of all their enemies, 
whose name will ever be cursed through the length and breadth of 
Scotland. Archbishop Sharp had ever aided and abetted all these 
outrages. But he fell at last ; for, when the injuries of the Scot- 
tish people were at their height, he was seen, in his coach-and-six 
coming across a moor, by a body of men, headed by one John 
Balfour, who were waiting for another of their oppressors. Upon 
this they cried out that Heaven had delivered him into their hands. 



A CHILD'S HISTOEY OF ENGLAND. 653 

and killed him with many wounds. If ever a man deserved such a 
death, I think Archbishop Sharp did. 

It made a great noise directly, and the Merry Monarch — strongly 
suspected of having goaded the Scottish people on, that he might 
have an excuse for a greater army than the Parliament were willing 
to give him — sent down his son, the Duke of Monmouth, as com- 
mander-in-chief, with instructions to attack the Scottish rebels, or 
Whigs as they were called, whenever he came up with them. 
Marching with ten thousand men from Edinburgh, he found them, 
in number four or five thousand, drawn up at Bothwell Bridge, by 
the Clyde. They were soon dispersed ; and Monmouth showed a 
more humane character towards them, than he had shown towards 
that Member of Parliament whose nose he had caused to be slit 
with a penknife. But the Duke of Lauderdale was their bitter 
foe, and sent Claverhouse to finish them. 

As the Duke of York became more and more unpopular, the 
Duke of Monmouth became more and more popular. It would 
have been decent in the latter not to have voted in favour of the 
renewed bill for the exclusion of James from the throne ; but he 
did so, much to the King's amusement, who used to sit in the 
House of Lords by the fire, hearing the debates, which he said 
were as good a& a play. The House of Commons passed the bill 
by a large majority, and it was carried up to the House of Lords 
by Lord Russell, one of the best of the leaders on the Protestant 
side. It was rejected there, chiefly because the bishops helped the 
King to get rid of it ; and the fear of Catholic plots revived again. 
There had been another got up, by a fellow out of Newgate, named 
Daistgerfield, which is more famous than it deserves to be, under 
the name of the Meal-Tub Plot. This jail-bird having been got 
out of Newgate by a Mrs. Cellier, a Catholic nurse, had turned 
Catholic himself, and pretended that he knew of a plot among the 
Presbyterians against the King's life. This was very pleasant to 
the Duke of York, who hated the Presbyterians, who returned the 
compliment. He gave Dangerfield twenty guineas, and sent him 
to the King his brother. But Dangerfield, breaking down altogether 
in his charge, and being sent back to Newgate, almost astonished the 
duke out of his five senses by suddenly swearing that the Catholic 
nurse had put that false design into his head, and that what he 
really knew about, was, a Catholic plot against the King ; the evi- 
dence of which would be found in some papers, concealed in a meal- 
tub in Mrs. Collier's house. There they were, of course — for he 
had put them there himself — and so the tub gave the name to the 
plot. But, the nurse was acquitted on her trial, and it came to 
nothing. 



654 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Lord Ashley, of the Cabal, was now Lord Shaftesbury, and was 
strong against the succession of the Duke of York. The House of 
Commons, aggravated to the utmost extent, as we may well sup- 
pose, by suspicions of the King's conspiracy with the King of 
France, made a desperate point of the exclusion still, and were 
bitter against the Catholics generally. So unjustly bitter were 
they, I grieve to say, that they impeached the venerable Lord Staf- 
ford, a Catholic nobleman seventy years old, of a design to kill the 
King. The witnesses were that atrocious Gates and two other birds 
of the same feather. He was found guilty, on evidence quite as 
foolish as it was false, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. The 
people were opposed to him when he first appeared upon the scaf- 
fold ; but, when he had addressed them and shown them how inno- 
cent he was and how wickedly he was sent there, their better nature 
was aroused, and they said, "We believe you, my Lord. God bless 
you, my Lord ! " 

The House of Commons refused to let the King have any money 
until he should consent to the Exclusion Bill ; but, as he could get 
it and did get it from his master the King of France, he could afford 
to hold them very cheap. He called a Parliament at Oxford, to 
which he went down with a great show of being armed and pro- 
tected as if he were in danger of his life, and to which the opposi- 
tion members also went armed and protected, alleging that they 
were in fear of the Papists, who were numerous among the King's 
guards. However, they went on with the Exclusion Bill, and were 
so earnest upon it that they would have carried it again, if the King 
had not popped his crown and state robes into a sedan-chair, bun- 
dled himself into it along with them, hurried down to the chamber 
where the House of Lords met, and dissolved the Parliament. 
After which he scampered home, and the members of Parliament 
scampered home too, as fast as their legs could carry them. 

The Duke of York, then residing in Scotland, had, under the law 
which excluded Catholics from public trust, no right whatever to 
public employment. Nevertheless, he was openly employed as the 
King's representative in Scotland, and there gratified his sullen and 
cruel nature to his heart's content by directing the dreadful cruel- 
ties against the Covenanters. There were two ministers named 
Cargill and Cameron who had escaped from the battle of Both- 
well Bridge, and who returned to Scotland, and raised the miserable 
but still brave and unsubdued Covenanters afresh, under the name 
of Cameronians. As Cameron publicly posted a declaration that 
the King was a forsworn tyrant, no mercy was shown to his un- 
happy followers after he was slain in battle. The Duke of York, 
who was particularly fond of the Boot and derived great pleasure 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 6o5 

from having it applied, offered their lives to some of these people, 
if they would cry on the scaffold " God save the King ! " But 
their relations, friends, and countrymen, had been so barbarously 
tortured and murdered in this merry reign, that they preferred to 
die, and did die. The duke then obtained his merry brother's 
permission to hold a Parliament in Scotland, which first, with most 
shameless deceit, confirmed the laws for securing the Protestant re- 
ligion against Popery, and then declared that nothing must or should 
prevent the succession of the Popish duke. After this double- 
faced beginning, it established an oath which no human being could 
understand, but which everybody was to take, as a proof that his 
religion was the lawful religion. The Earl of Argyle, taking it 
with the explanation that he did not consider it to prevent him 
from favouring any alteration either in the Church or State which 
was not inconsistent with the Protestant religion or with his loyalty, 
was tried for high treason before a Scottish jury of which the Mar- 
quis OF Montrose was foreman, and was found guilty. He es- 
caped the scaffold, for that time, by getting away, in the disguise 
of a page, in the train of his daughter. Lady Sophia Lindsay. 
It was absolutely proposed, by certain members of the Scottish 
Council, that this lady should be whipped through the streets of 
Edinburgh. But this was too much even for the duke, who had 
the manliness then (he had very little at most times) to remark that 
Englishmen were not accustomed to treat ladies in that manner. 
In those merry times nothing could equal the brutal servility of 
the Scottish fawners, but the conduct of similar degraded beings in 
England. 

After the settlement of these little affairs, the duke returned to 
England, and soon resumed his place at the Council, and his office 
of High Admiral — all this by his brother's favour, and in open defi- 
ance of the law. It would have been no loss to the country, if he 
had been drowned when his ship, in going to Scotland to fetch his 
family, struck on a sand-bank, and was lost with two hundred 
souls on board. But he escaped in a boat with some friends ; and 
the sailors were so brave and unselfish, that, when they saw him 
rowing away, they gave three cheers, while they themselves were 
going down for ever. 

The Merry Monarch, having got rid of his Parliament, went to 
work to make himself despotic, with all speed. Having had the 
villany to order the execution of Oliver Plunket, Bishop of 
Armagh, falsely accused of a plot to establish Popery in that 
country by means of a French army — the very thing this royal 
traitor was himself trying to do at home — and having tried to 
ruin Lord Shaftesbury, and failed — he turned his hand to control- 



656 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

ling the corporations all over the country ; because, if he could 
only do that, he could get what juries he chose, to bring in per- 
jured verdicts, and could get what members he chose, returned to 
Parliament. These merry times produced, and made Chief Justice 
of the Court of King's Bench, a drunken ruffian of the name of Jef- 
freys; a red-faced swollen bloated horrible creature, mth a bully- 
ing roaring voice, and a more savage nature perhaps than was ever 
lodged in any human breast. This monster was the Merry Monarch's 
especial favourite, and he testified his admiration of him by giving 
him a ring from his own finger, Avhich the people used to call Judge 
Jefireys's Bloodstone. Him the King employed to go about and 
bully the corporations, beginning with London ; or, as Jeffreys him- 
self elegantly called it, " to give them a lick with the rough side of 
his tongue." And he did it so thoroughly, that they soon became 
the basest and most sycophantic bodies in the kingdom — except 
the University of Oxford, which, in that respect, was quite pre-emi- 
nent and unapproachable. 

Lord Shaftesbury (who died soon after the King's failure against 
him), Lord William Russell, the Duke of Monmouth, Lord 
Howard, Lord Jersey, Algernon Sidney, John Hampden 
(grandson of the great Hampden), and some others, used to hold 
a council together after the dissolution of the Parliament, arranging 
what it might be necessary to do, if the King carried his Popish 
plot to the utmost height. Lord Shaftesbury having been much 
the most violent of this party, brought two violent men into their 
secrets — Rumsey, who had been a soldier in the Republican army ; 
and West, a lawyer. These two knew an old officer of Cromwell's, 
called Rumbold, who had married a maltster's widow, and so had 
come into possession of a solitary dwelling called the Rye House, 
near Hoddesdon, in Hertfordshire. Rumbold said to them what a 
capital place this house of his would be from which to shoot at the 
King, who often passed there going to and fro from Newmarket. 
They liked the idea, and entertained it. But, one of their body 
gave information ; and they, together ^^dth Shepherd a wine mer- 
chant. Lord Russell, Algernon Sidney, Lord Essex, Lord How- 
ard, and Hampden, were all arrested. 

Lord Russell might have easily escaped, but scorned to do so, 
being innocent of any wrong ; Lord Essex might have easily escaped, 
but scorned to do so, lest his flight should prejudice Lord Russell. 
But it weighed upon his mind that he had brought into their coun- 
cil. Lord Howard — who now turned a miserable traitor — against 
a great dislike Lord Russell had always had of him. He could not 
bear the reflection, and destroyed himself before Lord Russell was 
brought to trial at the Old Bailey. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 657 

He knew very well that he had nothing to hope, having always 
been manful in the Protestant cause against the two false brothers, 
the one on the throne, and the other standing next to it. He had 
a wife, one of the noblest and best of women, who acted as his secre- 
tary on his trial, who comforted him in his prison, who supped 
with him on the night before he died, and whose love and virtue 
and devotion have made her name imperishable. Of course, he 
was found guilty, and was sentenced to be beheaded in Lincoln's 
Inn-fields, not many yards from his own house. When he had 
parted from his children on the evening before his death, his wife 
still stayed with him until ten o'clock at night ; and when their 
final separation in this world was over, and he had kissed her 
many times, he still sat for a long while in his prison, talking of 
her goodness. Hearing the rain fall fast at that time, he calmly 
said, " Such a rain to-morrow will spoil a great show, which is a 
dull thing on a rainy day." At midnight he went to bed, and 
slept till four; even when his servant called him, he fell asleep 
again while his clothes were being made ready. He rode to the 
scaffold in his own carriage, attended by two famous clergymen, 
TiLLOTSON and Burnet, and sang a psalm to himself very softly, 
as he went along. He was as quiet and as steady as if he had been 
going out for an ordinary ride. After saying that he was surprised 
to see so great a crowd, he laid down his head upon the block, as 
if upon the pillow of his bed, and had it struck off at the second 
blow. His noble wife was busy for him even then ; for that true- 
hearted lady printed and widely circulated his last words, of which 
he had given her a copy. They made the blood of all the honest 
men in England boil. 

The University of Oxford distinguished itself on the very same 
day by pretending to believe that the accusation against Lord Rus- 
sell was true, and by calling the King, in a written paper, the 
Breath of their Nostrils and the Anointed of the Lord. This paper 
the Parliament afterwards caused to be burned by the common 
hangman ; which I am sorry for, as I wish it had been framed and 
glazed and hung up in some public place, as a monument of base- 
ness for the scorn of mankind. 

Next, came the trial of Algernon Sidney, at which Jeffreys pre- 
sided, like a great crimson toad, sweltering and swelling with rage. 
"I pray God, Mr. Sidney," said this Chief Justice of a merry 
reign, after passing sentence, " to work in you a temper fit to go 
to the other world, for I see you are not fit for this." " My lord," 
said the prisoner, composedly holding out his arm, "feel my pulse, 
and see if I be disordered. I thank Heaven I never was in better 
temper than I am now." Algernon Sidney was executed on Tower 
2u 



658 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Hill, on the seventh of December, one thousand six hundred and 
eighty- three. He died a hero, and died, in his own words, " For 
that good old cause in which he had been engaged from his youth, 
and for which God had so often and so wonderfully declared him- 
self." 

The Duke of Monmouth had been making his uncle, the Duke 
of York, very jealous, by going about the country in a royal sort of 
way, playing at the people's games, becoming godfather to their 
children, and even touching for the King's evil, or stroking the faces 
of the sick to cure them — though, for the matter of that, I should 
say he did them about as much good as any crowned king could 
have done. His father had got him to write a letter, confessing 
his having had a part in the conspiracy, for which Lord Russell 
had been beheaded ; but he was ever a weak man, and as soon as 
he had written it, he was ashamed of it and got it back again. For 
this, he was banished to the Netherlands ; but he soon returned 
and had an interview with his father, unknown to his uncle. It 
would seem that he was coming into the Merry Monarch's favour 
again, and that the Duke of York was sliding out of it, when 
Death appeared to the merry galleries at Whitehall, and astonished 
the debauched lords and gentlemen, and the shameless ladies, very 
considerably. 

On Monday, the second of February, one thousand six hundred 
and eighty-five, the merry pensioner and servant of the King of 
France fell down in a fit of apoplexy. By the Wednesday his case 
was hopeless, and on the Thursday he was told so. As he made 
a difficulty about taking the sacrament from the Protestant Bishop 
of Bath, the Duke of York got all who were present away from 
the bed, and asked his brother, in a whisper, if he should send for 
a Catholic priest ? The King replied, " For God's sake, brother, do ! " 
The duke smuggled in, up the back stairs, disguised in a wig and 
gown, a priest named Huddleston, who had saved the King's life 
after the battle of Worcester : telling him that this worthy man in 
the wig had once saved his body, and was now come to save his soul. 

The Merry Monarch lived through that night, and died before 
noon on the next day, which was Friday, the sixth. Two of the 
last things he said were of a human sort, and your remembrance 
will give him the full benefit of them. When the Queen sent to 
say she was too unwell to attend him and to ask his pardon, he 
said, "Alas ! poor woman, she beg my pardon ! I beg hers with 
all my heart. Take back that answer to her." And he also said, 
in reference to Nell Gwyn, " Do not let poor Nelly starve." 

He died in the fifty-fifth year of his age, and the twenty-fifth of 
his reign. 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 659 

CHAPTER XXXVI. 

ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE SECOND. 

King James the Second was a man so very disagreeable, that 
even the best of historians has favoured his brother Charles, as 
becoming, by comparison, quite a pleasant character. The one 
object of his short reign was to re-establish the Catholic religion 
in England; and this he doggedly pursued with such a stupid 
obstinacy, that his career very soon came to a close. 

The first thing he did, was, to assure his Council that he would 
make it his endeavour to preserve the Government, both in Church 
and State, as it was by law established ; and that he would always 
take care to defend and support the Church. Great public accla- 
mations were raised over this fair speech, and a great deal was said, 
from the pulpits and elsewhere, about the word of a king which 
was never broken, by credulous people who little supposed that he 
had formed a secret Council for Catholic affairs, of which a mis- 
chievous Jesuit, called Father Petre, was one of the chief mem- 
bers. With tears of joy in his eyes, he received, as the beginning 
of his pension from the King of France, five hundred thousand 
livres ; yet, with a mixture of meanness and arrogance that belonged 
to his contemptible character, he was always jealous of making some 
show of being independent of the King of France, while he pocketed 
his money. As — notwithstanding his publishing two papers in 
favour of Popery (and not likely to do it much service, I should 
think) written by the King, his brother, and found in his strong- 
box ; and his open display of himself attending mass — the Parli^ 
ment was very obsequious, and granted him a large sum of money, 
he began his reign with a belief that he could do what he pleased, 
and with a determination to do it. 

Before we proceed to its principal events, let us dispose of Titus 
Gates. He was tried for perjury, a fortnight after the coronation, 
and besides being very heavily fined, was sentenced to stand twice 
in the pillory, to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate one day, 
and from Newgate to Tyburn two days afterwards, and to stand in 
the pillory five times a year as long as he lived. This fearful sen- 
tence was actually inflicted on the rascal. Being unable to stand 
after his first flogging, he was dragged on a sledge from Newgate 
to Tyburn, and flogged as he was drawn along. He was so strong 
a villain that he did not die under the torture, but lived to be 
afterwards pardoned and rewarded, though not to be ever believed 
in any more. Dangerfield, the only other one of that crew left 
alive, was not so fortunate. He was almost killed by a whipping 



660 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

from Newgate to Tyburn, and, as if that were not punishment 
enough, a ferocious barrister of Gray's Inn gave him a poke in the 
eye with his cane, which caused his death ; for which the ferocious 
barrister was deservedly tried and executed. 

As soon as James was on the throne, Argyle and Monmouth went 
from Brussels to Rotterdam, and attended a meeting of Scottish 
exiles held there, to concert measures for a rising in England. It 
was agreed that Argyle should effect a landing in Scotland, and 
Monmouth in England ; and that two Englishmen should be sent 
with Argyle to be in his confidence, and two Scotchmen with the 
Duke of Monmouth. 

Argyle was the first to act upon this contract. But, two of his 
men being taken prisoners at the Orkney Islands, the Government 
became aware of his intention, and was able to act against him with 
such vigour as to prevent his raising more than two or three thou- 
sand Highlanders, although he sent a fiery cross, by trusty messen- 
gers, from clan to clan and from glen to glen, as the custom then 
was when those wild people were to be excited by their chiefs. As 
he was moving towards Glasgow with his small force, he was be- 
trayed by some of his followers, taken, and carried, with his hands 
tied behind his back, to his old prison in Edinburgh Castle. James 
ordered him to be executed, on his old shamefully unjust sentence, 
within three days ; and he appears to have been anxious that his 
legs should have been pounded with his old favourite the boot. 
However, the boot was not applied ; he was simply beheaded, and 
his head was set upon the top of Edinburgh Jail. One of those 
Englishmen who had been assigned to him was that old soldier 
Eumbold, the master of the Rye House. He was sorely wounded, 
and within a week after Argyle had suffered with great courage, 
was brought up for trial, lest he should die and disappoint the King. 
He, too, was executed, after defending himself with great spirit, and 
saying tliat he did not believe that God had made the greater part 
of mankind to carry saddles on their backs and bridles in their 
mouths, and to be ridden by a few, booted and spurred for the 
purpose — in which I thoroughly agree with Rumbold. 

The Duke of Monmouth, partly through being detained and 
partly through idling his time away, was five or six weeks behind 
his friend when he landed at Lyme, in Dorset : having at his right 
hand an unlucky nobleman called Lord Grey of Werk, who of 
himself would have ruined a far more promising expedition. He 
immediately set up his standard in the market-place, and pro- 
claimed the King a tyrant, and a Popish usurper, and I know not 
what else ; charging him, not only with what he had done, which 
was bad enough, but with what neither he nor anybody else had 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 661 

done, such as setting fire to London, and poisoning the late King. 
Raising some four thousand men by these means, he marched on to 
Taunton, where there were many Protestant dissenters who were 
strongly opposed to the Catholics. Here, both the rich and poor 
turned out to receive him, ladies waved a welcome to him from all 
the windows as he passed along the streets, flowers were strewn in 
his way, and every compliment and honour that could be devised 
was showered upon him. Among the rest, twenty young ladies 
came forward, in their best clothes, and in their brightest beauty, and 
gave him a Bible ornamented with their own fair hands, together 
with other presents. 

Encouraged by this homage, he proclaimed himself King, and 
went on to Bridgewater. But, here the Government troops, under 
the Earl of Feveesham, were close at hand: and he was so dis- 
pirited at finding that he made but few powerful friends after aU, 
that it was a question whether he should disband his army and 
endeavour to escape. It was resolved, at the instance of that un- 
lucky Lord Grey, to make a night attack on the King's army, as 
it lay encamped on the edge of a morass called Sedgemoor, The 
horsemen were commanded by the same unlucky lord, who was not 
a brave man. He gave up the battle almost at the first obstacle 
— which was a deep drain : and although the poor countrj^men, 
who had turned out for Monmouth, fought bravely with scythes, 
poles, pitchforks, and such poor weapons as they had, they were 
soon dispersed by the trained soldiers, and fled in all directions. 
When the Duke of Monmouth himself fled, was not known in the 
confusion ; but the unlucky Lord Grey was taken early next day, 
and then another of the party was taken, who confessed that he 
had parted from the duke only four hours before. Strict search 
being made, he was found disguised as a peasant, hidden in a ditch 
under fern and nettles, with a few peas in his pocket which he had 
gathered in the fields to eat. The only other articles he had upon 
him were a few papers and little books : one of the latter being a 
strange jumble, in his own writing, of charms, songs, recipes, and 
prayers. He was completely broken. He wrote a miserable letter 
to the King, beseeching and entreating to be allowed to see him. 
When he was taken to London, and conveyed bound into the King's 
presence, he crawled to him on his knees, and made a most degrad- 
ing exhibition. As James never forgave or relented towards any- 
body, he was not likely to soften towards the issuer of the Lyme 
proclamation, so he told the suppliant to prepare for death. 

On the fifteenth of July, one thousand six hundred and eighty- 
five, this unfortunate favourite of the people was brought out to die 
on Tower Hill. The crowd was immense, and the tops of all the 



662 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

houses were covered with gazers. He had seen his wife, the 
daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch, in the Tower, and had talked 
much of a lady whom he loved far better — the Lady Harriet 
Wentworth — who was one of the last persons he remembered in 
this life. Before laying down his head upon the block he felt the 
edge of the axe, and told the executioner that he feared it was not 
sharp enough, and that the axe was not heavy enough. On the 
executioner replying that it was of the proper kind, the duke said, 
" I pray you have a care, and do not use me so awkwardly as you 
used my Lord Russell." The executioner, made nervous by this, 
and trembling, struck once and merely gashed him in the neck. 
Upon this, the Duke of Monmouth raised his head and looked the 
man reproachfully in the face. Then he struck twice, and then 
thrice, and then threw down the axe, and cried out in a voice of 
horror that he could not finish that work. The sheriffs, however, 
threatening him with what should be done to himself if he did 
not, he took it up again and struck a fourth time and a fifth time. 
Then the wretched head at last fell off", and James, Duke of Mon- 
mouth, was dead, in the thirty-sixth year of his age. He was a 
showy graceful man, with many popular qualities, and had found 
much favour in the open hearts of the English. 

The atrocities, committed by the G-overnment, which followed 
this Monmouth rebellion, form the blackest and most lamentable 
page in English history. The poor peasants, having been dispersed 
with great loss, and their leaders having been taken, one would 
think that the implacable King might have been satisfied. But 
no; he let loose upon them, among other intolerable monsters, a 
Colonel Kirk, who had served against the Moors, and whose sol- 
diers — called by the people Kirk's lambs, because they bore a lamb 
upon their flag, as the emblem of Christianity — were worthy of 
their leader. The atrocities committed by these demons in human 
shape are far too horrible to be related here. It is enough to say, 
that besides most ruthlessly murdering and robbing them, and ruin- 
ing them by making them buy their pardons at the price of all they 
possessed, it was one of Kirk's favourite amusements, as he and his 
officers sat drinking after dinner, and toasting the King, to have 
batches of prisoners hanged outside the windows for the company's 
diversion ; and that when their feet quivered in the convulsions of 
death, he used to swear that they should have music to their danc- 
ing, and would order the drums to beat and the trumpets to play. 
The detestable King informed him, as an acknowledgment of these I 
services, that he was "very well satisfied with his proceedings."! 
But the King's great delight was in the proceedings of Jeffreys,,! 
now a peer, who went down into the west, with four other judges, j 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 663 

to try persons accused of having had any share in the rebellion. 
The King pleasantly called this " Jeffreys's campaign." The people 
down in that part of the country remember it to this day as The 
Bloody Assize. 

It began at Winchester, where a poor deaf old lady, Mrs. Alicia 
Lisle, the widow of one of the judges of Charles the First (who 
had been murdered abroad by some Royalist assassins), was charged 
with having given shelter in her house to two fugitives from Sedge- 
moor. Three times the jury refused to find her guilty, until Jef- 
freys bullied and frightened them into that false verdict. When he 
had extorted it from them, he said, " Gentlemen, if I had been one 
of you, and she had been my own mother, I would have found her 
guilty ; " — as I dare say he would. He sentenced her to be burned 
alive, that very afternoon. The clergy of the cathedral and some 
others interfered in her favour, and she was beheaded within a week. 
As a high mark of his approbation, the King made Jefireys Lord 
Chancellor; and he then went on to Dorchester, to Exeter, to 
Taunton, and to Wells. It is astonishing, when we read of the 
enormous injustice and barbarity of this beast, to know that no one 
struck him dead on the judgment-seat. It was enough for any man 
or woman to be accused by an enemy, before Jefireys, to be found 
guilty of high treason. One man who pleaded not guilty, he ordered 
to be taken out of court upon the instant, and hanged ; and this 
so terrified the prisoners in general that they mostly pleaded guilty 
at once. At Dorchester alone, in the course of a few days, Jeffreys 
hanged eighty people ; besides whipping, transporting, imprison- 
ing, and selling as slaves, great numbers. He executed, in all, two 
hundred and fifty, or three hundred. 

These executions took place, among the neighbours and friends of 
the sentenced, in thirty-six towns and villages. Their bodies were 
mangled, steeped in caldrons of boiling pitch and tar, and hung up 
by the roadsides, in the streets, over the very churches. The sight 
and smell of heads and limbs, the hissing and bubbling of the infer- 
nal caldrons, and the tears and terrors of the people, were dread- 
ful beyond all description. One rustic, who was forced to steep 
the remains in the black pot, was ever afterwards called " Tom 
Boilman." The hangman has ever since been called Jack Ketch, 
because a man of that name went hanging and hanging, all day 
long, in the train of Jeffreys. You will hear much of the horrors 
of the great French Revolution. Many and terrible they were, 
there is no doubt ; but I know of nothing worse, done by the mad- 
dened people of France in that awful time, than was done by the 
highest judge in England, with the express approval of the King of 
England, in The Bloody Assize. 



664 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

Nor was even this all. Jeffreys was as fond of money for him- 
self as of misery for others, and he sold pardons wholesale to fill his 
pockets. The King ordered, at one time, a thousand prisoners to 
be given to certain of his favourites, in order that they might bar- 
gain with them for their pardons. The young ladies of Taunton 
who had presented the Bible, were bestowed upon the maids of 
honour at court ; and those precious ladies made very hard bargains 
with them indeed. When The Bloody Assize was at its most dis- 
mal height, the King was diverting himself with horse-races in the 
very place where Mrs. Lisle had been executed. When Jeffreys had 
done his worst, and came home again, he was particularly compli- 
mented in the Eoyal Gazette; and when the King heard that through 
drunkenness and raging he was very ill, his odious Majesty remarked 
that such another man could not easily be found in ■ England. 
Besides all this, a former sheriff of London, named Coenish, was 
hanged within sight of his own house, after an abominably con- 
ducted trial, for having had a share in the Rye House Plot, on evi- 
dence given by Rumsey, which that villain was obliged to confess 
was directly opposed to the evidence he had given on the trial of 
Lord Russell. And on the very same day, a worthy widow, named 
Elizabeth Gaunt, was burned alive at Tyburn, for having shel- 
tered a wretch who himself gave evidence against her. She settled 
the fuel about herself with her own hands, so that the flames should 
reach her quickly; and nobly said, with her last breath, that she 
had obeyed the sacred command of God, to give refuge to the out- 
cast, and not to betray the wanderer. 

After all this hanging, beheading, burning, boiling, mutilating, 
exposing, robbing, transporting, and selling into slavery, of his un- 
happy subjects, the King not unnaturally thought that he could do 
whatever he would. So, he went to work to change the religion of 
the country with all possible speed ; and what he did was this. 

He first of all tried to get rid of what was called the Test Act — 
which prevented the Catholics from holding public employments — 
by his own power of dispensing with the penalties. He tried it in 
one case, and, eleven of the twelve judges deciding in his favour, he 
exercised it in three others, being those of three dignitaries of Uni- 
versity College, Oxford, who had become Papists, and whom he kept 
in their places and sanctioned. He revived the hated Ecclesiasti- 
cal Commission, to get rid of Compton, Bishop of London, who 
manfully opposed him. He solicited the Pope to favour England 
with an ambassador, which the Pope (who was a sensible man then) 
rather unwillingly did. He flourished Father Petre before the eyes 
of the people on all possible occasions. He favoured the establish- 
ment of convents in several parts of London. He was delighted 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 665 

to have the streets, and even the Court itself, filled with Monks and 
Friars in the habits of their orders. He constantly endeavoured to 
make Catholics of the Protestants about him. . He held private 
interviews, which he called " closetings," with those Members of 
Parliament who held offices, to persuade them to consent to the 
design he had in view. When they did not consent, they were 
removed, or resigned of themselves, and their places were given 
to Catholics. He displaced Protestant officers from the army, by 
every means in his power, and got Catholics into their places too. 
He tried the same thing with the corporations, and also (though 
not so successfully) with the Lord Lieutenants of counties. To 
terrify the people into the endurance of all these measures, he kept 
an army of fifteen thousand men encamped on Hounslow Heath, 
where mass was openly performed in the General's tent, and where 
priests went among the soldiers endeavouring to persuade them to 
become Catholics. For circulating a paper among those men ad- 
vising them to be true to their religion, a Protestant clergyman, 
named Johnson, the chaplain of the late Lord Russell, was actu- 
ally sentenced to stand three times in the pillory, and was actually 
whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. He dismissed his own brother- 
in-law from his Council because he was a Protestant, and made a 
Privy Councillor of the before-mentioned Father Petre. He handed 
Ireland over to Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, a worth- 
less, dissolute knave, who played the same game there for his mas- 
ter, and who played the deeper game for himself of one day putting 
it under the protection of the French King. In going to these 
extremities, every man of sense and judgment among the Catholics, 
from the Pope to a porter, knew that the King was a mere bigoted 
fool, who would undo himself and the cause he sought to advance ; 
but he was deaf to all reason, and, happily for England ever after- 
wards, went tumbling off his throne in his own blind way. 

A spirit began to arise in the country, which the besotted 
blunderer little expected. He first found it out in the University 
of Cambridge. Having made a Catholic, a dean, at Oxford, with- 
out any opposition, he tried to make a monk a master of arts at 
Cambridge : which attempt the University resisted, and defeated 
him. He then went back to his favourite Oxford. On the death 
of the President of Magdalen College, he commanded that there 
should be elected to succeed him, one Mr. Anthony Farmer, 
whose only recommendation was, that he was of the King's relig- 
ion. The University plucked up courage at last, and refused. 
The King substituted another man, and it still refused, resolving 
to stand by its own election of a Mr. Hough. The dull tyrant, 
upon this, punished Mr. Hough, and five-and-twenty more, by 



666 A CHILD'S HISTOEY OF ENGLAND. 

causing them to be expelled and declared incapable of holding 
any church preferment ; then he proceeded to what he supposed 
to be his highest step, but to what was, in fact, his last plunge 
headforemost in his tumble off his throne. 

He had issued a declaration that there should be no religious 
tests or penal laws, in order to let in the Catholics more easily ; 
but the Protestant dissenters, unmindful of themselves, had gal- 
lantly joined the regular church in opposing it tooth and nail. 
The King and Father Petre now resolved to have this read, on a 
certain Sunday, in all the churches, and to order it to be circulated 
for that purpose by the bishops. The latter took counsel with 
the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in disgrace ; and they 
resolved that the declaration should not be read, and that they 
would petition the King against it. The Archbishop himself 
wrote out the petition, and six bishops went into the King's bed- 
chamber the same night to present it, to his infinite astonishment. 
Next day was the Sunday fixed for the reading, and it was only 
read by two hundred clergymen out of ten thousand. The King 
resolved against all advice to prosecute the bishops in the Court 
of King's Bench, and within three weeks they were summoned 
before the Privy Council, and committed to the Tower. As the 
six bishops were taken to that dismal place, by water, the people 
who were assembled in immense numbers fell upon their knees, 
and wept for them, and prayed for them. When they got to the 
Tower, the officers and soldiers on guard besought them for their 
blessing. While they were confined there, the soldiers every day 
drank to their release with loud shouts. W^hen they were brought 
up to the Court of King's Bench for their trial, which the Attorney- 
General said was for the high ofi'ence of censuring the Government, 
and giving their opinion about affliirs of state, they were attended 
by similar multitudes, and surrounded by a throng of noblemen 
and gentlemen. When the jury went out at seven o'clock at night 
to consider of their verdict, everybody (except the King) knew 
that they would rather starve than yield to the King's brewer, who 
was one of them, and wanted a verdict for his customer. When 
they came into court next morning, after resisting the brewer all 
night, and gave a verdict of not guilty, such a shout rose up in 
Westminster Hall as it had never heard before ; and it was passed 
on among the people away to Temple Bar, and away again to the 
Tower. It did not pass only to the east, but passed to the west 
too, until it reached the camp at Hounslow, where the fifteen thou- 
sand soldiers took it up and echoed it. And still, when the dull 
King, who was then with Lord Feversham, heard the mighty roar, 
asked in alarm what it was, and was told that it was " nothing but 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 667 

the acquittal of the bishops," he said, in his dogged way, " Call 
you that nothing? It is so much the worse for them." 

Between the petition and the trial, the Queen had given birth to 
a son, which Father Petre rather thought was owing to Saint Wini- 
fred. But I doubt if Saint Winifred had much to do with it as the 
King's friend, inasmuch as the entirely new prospect of a Catholic 
successor (for both the King's daughters were Protestants) deter- 
mined the Earls of Shrew^sbury, Danby, and Devonshire, 
Lord Lumley, the Bishop of London, Admiral Russell, and 
Colonel Sidney, to invite the Prince of Orange over to England. 
The Royal Mole, seeing his danger at last, made, in his fright, 
many great concessions, besides raising an army of forty thousand 
men ; but the Prince of Orange was not a man for James the Sec- 
ond to cope with. His preparations were extraordinarily vigorous, 
and his mind was resolved. 

For a fortnight after the Prince was ready to sail for England, 
a great wind from the west prevented the departure of his fleet. 
Even when the wind lulled, and it did sail, it was dispersed by a 
storm, and was obliged to put back to refit. At last, on the first 
of November, one thousand six hundred and eighty-eight, the Prot- 
estant east wind, as it was long called, began to blow ; and on the 
third, the people of Dover and the people of Calais saw a fleet 
twenty miles long sailing gallantly by, between the two places. 
On Monday, the fifth, it anchored at Torbay in Devonshire, and 
the Prince, with a splendid retinue of officers and men, marched 
into Exeter. But the people in that w^estern part of the country 
had suffered so much in The Bloody Assize, that they had lost 
heart. Few people joined him ; and he began to think of return- 
ing, and publishing the invitation he had received from those lords, 
as his justification for having come at all. At this crisis, some of 
the gentry joined him ; the Royal army began to falter ; an engage- 
ment was signed, by which all who set their hand to it declared 
that they would support one another in defence of the laws and 
liberties of the three Kingdoms, of the Protestant religion, and of 
the Prince of Orange. From that time, the cause received no 
check ; the greatest towns in England began, one after another, to 
declare for the Prince ; and he knew that it was all safe with him 
when the University of Oxford offered to melt down its plate, if 
he wanted any money. 

By this time the King was running about in a pitiable way, 
touching people for the King's evil in one place, reviewing his 
troops in another, and bleeding from the nose in a third. The 
young Prince was sent to Portsmouth, Father Petre went off like 
a shot to France, and there was a general and swift dispersal of 



668 A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 

all the priests and friars. One after another, the King's most im- 
portant officers and friends deserted him and went over to the 
Prince. In the night, his daughter Anne fled from Whitehall 
Palace ; and the Bishop of London, who had once been a soldier, 
rode before her with a drawn sword in his hand, and pistols at his 
saddle. "God help me," cried the miserable King: "my very 
children have forsaken me ! " In his wildness, after debating with 
such lords as were in London, whether he should or should not call 
a Parliament, and after naming three of them to negotiate with 
the Prince, he resolved to fly to France. He had the little Prince 
of Wales brought back from Portsmouth ; and the child and the 
Queen crossed the river to Lambeth in an open boat, on a miser- 
able wet night, and got safely away. This was on the night of 
the ninth of December. 

At one o'clock on the morning of the eleventh, the King, who 
had, in the meantime, received a letter from the Prince of Orange, 
stating his objects, got out of bed, told Lord Northumberland 
w^ho lay in his room not to open the door until the usual hour in 
the morning, and went down the back stairs (the same, I suppose, 
by which the priest in the wig and gown had come up to his 
brother) and crossed the river in a small boat : sinking the great 
seal of England by the way. Horses having been provided, he 
rode, accompanied by Sir Edward Hales, to Feversham, where 
he embarked in a Custom House Hoy. The master of this Hoy, 
wanting more ballast, ran into the Isle of Sheppy to get it, where 
the fishermen and smugglers crowded about the boat, and informed 
the King of their suspicions that he was a " hatchet-faced Jesuit." 
As they took his money and would not let him go, he told them 
who he was, and that the Prince of Orange wanted to take his 
life ; and he began to scream for a boat — and then to cry, because 
he had lost a piece of wood on his ride which he called a fragment 
of Our Saviour's cross. He put himself into the hands of the Lord 
Lieutenant of the county, and his detention was made known to 
the Prince of Orange at Windsor — who, only wanting to get rid 
of him, and not caring where he went, so that he went away, was 
very much disconcerted that they did not let him go. However, 
there was nothing for it but to have him brought back, with some 
state in the way of Life Guards, to Whitehall. And as soon as 
he got there, in his infatuation, he heard mass, and set a Jesuit to 
say grace at his public dinner. 

The people had been thrown into the strangest state of confusion 
by his flight, and had taken it into their heads that the Irish part 
of the army were going to murder the Protestants. Therefore, 
they set the bells a ringing, and lighted watch-fires, and burned 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 669 

Catholic Chapels, and looked about in all directions for Father 
Petre and the Jesuits, while the Pope's ambassador was running 
away in the dress of a footman. They found no Jesuits ; but a 
man, who had once been a frightened witness before Jeffreys in 
court, saw a swollen drunken face looking through a window 
down at Wapping, which he well remembered. The face was in 
a sailor's dress, but he knew it to be the face of that accursed 
Judge, and he seized him. The people, to their lasting honour, 
did not tear him to pieces. After knocking him about a little, 
they took him, in the basest agonies of terror, to the Lord Mayor, 
who sent him, at his own shrieking petition, to the Tower for safety. 
There, he died. 

Their bewilderment continuing, the people now lighted bonfires 
and made rejoicings, as if they had any reason to be glad to have 
the King back again. But, his stay was very short, for the 
English guards were removed from Whitehall, Dutch guards were 
marched up to it, and he was told by one of his late ministers that 
the Prince would enter London next day, and he had better go to 
Ham. He said, Ham was a cold damp place, and he would rather 
go to Rochester. He thought himself very cunning in this, as he 
meant to escape from Rochester to France. The Prince of Orange 
and his friends knew that, perfectly well, and desired nothing more. 
So, he went to G-ravesend, in his royal barge, attended by certain 
lords, and watched by Dutch troops, and pitied by the generous 
people, who w^ere far more forgiving than he had ever been, when 
they saw him in his humihation. On the night of the twenty-third 
of December, not even then understanding that everybody wanted 
to get rid of him, he went out, absurdly, through his Rochester 
garden, down to the Medway, and got away to France, where he 
rejoined the Queen. 

There had been a council in his absence, of the lords, and the 
authorities of London. When the Prince came, on the day after 
the King's departure, he summoned the lords to meet him, and 
soon afterwards, all those who had served in any of the Parlia- 
ments of King Charles the Second. It was finally resolved by 
these authorities that the throne was vacant by the conduct of 
King James the Second ; that it was inconsistent with the safety 
and welfare of this Protestant kingdom, to be governed by a Popish 
prince; that the Prince and Princess of Orange should be King 
and Queen during their lives and the life of the survivor of them ; 
and that their children should succeed them, if they had any. 
That if they had none, the Princess Anne and her children should 
succeed ; that if she had none, the heirs of the Prince of Orange 
should succeed. 



670 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. 



On the thirteenth of January, one thousand six hundred and 
eighty-nine, the Prince and Princess, sitting on a throne in White- 
hall, bound themselves to these conditions. The Protestant relig- 
ion was established in England, and England's great and glorious 
Revolution was complete. 



CHAPTER XXXVII. 



I HAVE now arrived at the close of my little history. The events 
which succeeded the famous Revolution of one thousand six hundred 
and eighty-eight, would neither be easily related nor easily under- 
stood in such a book as this. 

William and Mary reigned together, five years. After the death 
of his good wife, William occupied the throne, alone, for seven years 
longer. During his reign, on the sixteenth of September, one thou- 
sand seven hundred and one, the poor weak creature who had once 
been James the Second of England, died in France. In the mean- 
time he had done his utmost (which was not much) to cause Wil- 
liam to be assassinated, and to regain his lost dominions. James's 
son was declared, by the French King, the rightful King of Eng- 
land ; and was called in France, The Chevaliee Saint George, 
and in England The Pretender. Some infatuated people in Eng- 
land, and particularly in Scotland, took up the Pretender's cause 
from time to time — as if the country had not had Stuarts enough ! 
— and many lives were sacrificed, and much misery was occasioned. 
King William died on Sunday, the seventh of March, one thousand 
seven hundred and two, of the consequences of an accident occa- 
sioned by his horse stumbling with him. He was always a brave 
patriotic Prince, and a man of remarkable abilities. His manner 
was cold, and he made but few friends ; but he had truly loved his 
queen. When he was dead, a lock of her hair, in a ring, was found 
tied with a black ribbon round his left arm. 

He was succeeded by the Princess Anne, a popular Queen, who 
reigned twelve years. In her reign, in the month of May, one thou- 
sand seven hundred and seven, the Union between England and 
Scotland was effected, and the two countries were incorporated 
under the name of Great Britain. Then, from the year one 
thousand seven hundred and fourteen to the year one thousand 
eight hundred and thirty, reigned the four Georges. 

It was in the reign of George the Second, one thousand seven 
hundred and forty-five, that the Pretender did his last mischief, 
and made his last appearance. Being an old man by that time, he 



A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND. G71 

and the Jacobites — as bis friends were called — put forward bis 
son, Charles Edward, known as tbe Young Chevalier. The High- 
landers of Scotland, an extremely troublesome and wrong-beaded 
race on tbe subject of tbe Stuarts, espoused his cause, and he joined 
them, and there was a Scottish rebellion to make him king, in which 
many gallant and devoted gentlemen lost their lives. It was a 
hard matter for Charles Edward to escape abroad again, with a 
high price on his head ; but the Scottish people were extraordi- 
narily faithful to him, and, after undergoing many romantic advent- 
ures, not unbke those of Charles the Second, he escaped to France. 
A number of charming stories and delightful songs arose out of the 
Jacobite feelings, and belong to the Jacobite times. Otherwise I 
think the Stuarts were a public nuisance altogether. 

It was in the reign of George the Third that England lost North 
America, by persisting in taxing her without her own consent. 
That immense country, made independent under Washington, 
and left to itself, became the United States; one of the greatest 
nations of the earth. In these times in which I write, it is honour- 
ably remarkable for protecting its subjects, wherever they may 
travel, with a dignity and a determination which is a model for 
England. Between you and me, England has rather lost ground 
in this respect since the days of Oliver CromweU. 

The Union of Great Britain with Ireland — which had been get- 
ting on very ill by itself — took place in the reign of George the 
Third, on the second of July, one thousand seven hundred and 
ninety-eight. 

William the Fourth succeeded George the Fourth, in the year 
one thousand eight hundred and thirty, and reigned seven years. 
Queen Victoria, bis niece, the only child of the Duke of Kent, 
the fourth son of George the Third, came to the throne on the twen- 
tieth of June, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-seven. She 
was married to Prince Albert of Saxe Gotha on the tenth of 
February, one thousand eight hundred and forty. She is very good, 
and much beloved. So I end, like the crier, with 

God Save the Queen ! 



THE NOVELS OF CHARLES DICKENS. 

New Edition, with all tlie Original Illustrations. 

i2ino. Cloth. $i.oo each volume. 

These volumes are in all cases accurate reprints of the texts of the first editions, 
and are accompanied by all the original illustrations. There is also prefixed in each 
volume a short introduction written by Mr. Charles Dickens, the novelist's eldest 
son, giving a history of the writing and publication of each book, together with 
other details, biographical and bibliographical, likely to be of interest to the reader- 



NOW READY. 

THE PICKWICK PAPERS. 

50 Illustrations. 

OLIVER TWIST. 

27 Illustrations. 

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. 

44 Illustrations. 

MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. 

41 Illustrations. 

THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. 

97 Illustrations. 

BARNABY RUDGE. 

76 Illustrations. 

SKETCHES BY BOZ. 

44 Illustrations. 

GREAT EXPECTATIONS and 
HARD TIMES. 



DOMBEY AND SON. 

40 Illustrations. 
CHRISTMAS BOOKS. 

65 Illustrations. 
DAVID COPPERFIELD. 

41 Illustrations. 
AMERICAN NOTES and PIC- 
TURES FROM ITALY. 

4 Illustrations. 

LETTERS. 1 833-1 870. 

LITTLE DORRIT. 

BLEAK HOUSE. 

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. 



TALE OF TWO CITIES and 
EDWIN DROOD. 

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER and A CHILD'S HIS- 
TORY OF ENGLAND. 

To be followed by 

CHRISTMAS STORIES. 

REPRINTED PIECES and THE LAZY TOUR OF TWO 

IDLE APPRENTICES. 



MACMILLAN & CO., 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW^ YORK. 



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